Boulder Valley tackles ‘chair mountain’

Stacked behind the Boulder Valley Education Center is a “mountain” of hundreds of student desks and chairs that are beyond their life span and unusable.

But rather than dump them into a landfill, the school district is sending the desks to Arkansas-based Virco Manufacturing Corporation, which can recycle the plastic seats, wooden desks and metal legs, said Boulder Valley bond spokeswoman Susan Cousins.

“When those parts are shipped back to the factory, they’ll recycle them and reuse them in new furniture,” Cousins said.

Boulder Valley School District employees will spend four hours this morning disassembling metal bases from plastic bucket seats and wooden desktops so that the parts can be delivered to the manufacturing plant.

The equipment in “chair mountain,” which runs the length of the district’s surplus building behind the education center at 6500 E. Arapahoe Road, was collected during the first phase of the district’s $296.8 million bond project. The old desks came from Louisville and Southern Hills middle schools, Foothill Elementary School and Broomfield High School, said Bill Sutter, executive director of budget and procurement services for the district.

“Upholstery is the only thing they can’t take,” Sutter said. “For the most part, each of these things is 100-percent recyclable.”

Etched into the cracked and rusty desks piled up behind the education center are love notes, hearts and three-dimensional boxes. Thousands of decades-old pieces of gum are stuck to the undersides of the aged equipment, and some of the metal baskets attached to the chairs have snapped off.

“If you walked outside and looked at the pile of chairs, it looks like useful stuff,” Sutter said. “But if you get up close, you see the cracked seats and the five pounds of gum. We squeezed all the utility out of these things.”

Some people have asked the district why it doesn’t send the equipment to schools that don’t have money for new equipment, Sutter said.

“There is a point at which the useful life has been squeezed out of it,” he said. “What is left is really not usable.”

Boulder Valley previously sent trashed desks — and similar equipment — to the landfill. That’s “definitely not what (Boulder Valley) wants to do now,” officials said in a news release.

As part of a districtwide effort to become more green, Boulder Valley has been reducing its use of landfills through “take-back” programs, like the one with Virco, and through a partnership with Resource 2000 — a Boulder-based landfill diversion company.

Sutter said there’s a “marginal cost” associated with shipping equipment to recycling corporations.

“But it’s the right thing to do,” he said.