Graduate student turns trash into treasure

Graduate student Brian Crabill has been at IU for four years, earning his undergraduate degree in psychology and now studying nutrition science. After 12 semesters, it is safe to say that Crabill has purchased a considerable number of texts. \nWhen he went to sell some of those books back a couple years ago, he noticed a trend that he said disturbed him.\n"I just watched three or four people in a row go to sell their books back, come right back out of the bookstore and throw them into a trash can," he said. "And I thought it was really wasteful."\nTo combat this wastefulness, Crabill contacted Better World Books, a business that organizes book drives at more than 500 college campuses across the United States. He found out that no one was running a drive at IU, and he decided to collect the textbooks that students were not able to sell back. Crabill has drop boxes for unwanted books at all TIS buy-back locations and in Ashton and Forest residence halls.\n"One of the main points of the book drive is we're not looking to take away profits from bookstores selling books back," he said, adding that professors can donate advanced copies of books that will not be used for class. "One of the big contributors are the books that don't get sold back, no-value books. They're the ones students say 'I paid $85 for this and they're not even taking this back.'"\nCrabill will retrieve the books from the collection sites and prepare them to be shipped to the South Bend warehouse. He said sometimes there are so many books that his apartment cannot hold them and he has to use a friend's garage.\nOnce the books have been sent to South Bend, Better World Books sells them and uses the profits to cover labor and shipping costs and to benefit the organization's three main literacy partners -- Books for Africa, Room to Read and the National Center for Family Literacy. Of these three, Crabill selected Books for Africa as his cause.\n"I don't like seeing things go to waste, any sort of resource ... and there is essentially a book famine in Africa now," Crabill said.\nAlthough King said it seemed like a crazy idea, he ran with the group's mantra "one man's trash is another man's treasure," and he ended up collecting 1,500 books from Purdue University during the first semester. It was then that they realized their crazy idea might develop into something much more.\nTo date, Better World Books has saved more than 2.6 million pounds of books from landfills and raised over $750,000 for 38 different non-profit literacy partners.\n"As much as we try to, there are still some people who don't know the drive exists," King said. "Our hope is that everyone will just know when that time comes around"