Members of the Bayfield Lions Club have collected more than 1,200 pairs of recycled eyeglasses from donation locations in Durango, Bayfield and Pagosa Springs. The collection effort is a part of a nationwide Lions Club eyeglass recycling initiative aimed at making lenses accessible for all.

“What are you going to do with old glasses that you don’t wear anymore?” said Jill Coddington, a Durango local who has donated nearly 30 glasses with the Lions Club. “This way, it’s benefiting someone else and doing good.”

Bayfield Lions Club has been facilitating eyeglass donations for decades. During this round, the majority of the frames were retrieved from a metal donation box, located on Church Street in Bayfield.

The box, which was set up in winter 2021, was emptied for the first time in June.

“We had about three 8-foot tables totally covered (in glasses),” said Sue Ann Gaherty. “Next time, we should probably check it sooner.”

Once the glasses are collected from the bin, she said Lions Club volunteers sort them into two piles, usable and unusable. Glasses with excessive lens scratching and body damage are discarded.

The usable glasses are packed into boxes and taken to Walmart in Durango, where they are combined with frames collected from the Walmart Vision Center.

“It’s about building goodwill in the community,” said Liz Glanz, manager at the Durango Walmart Vision Center. “Everyone working in a Walmart Vision Center does it because they want to help people.”

Walmart has partnered with Lions Clubs around the region to provide free-of-charge transportation of donated frames to recycling centers. Once all the Durango-area glasses are compiled, they are loaded into Walmart semi trucks and driven to the Texas Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center in Midland, Texas.

Once there, the glasses are mixed with thousands of others from Texas and surrounding states.

“(We get) donations from anybody and everybody; store locations, doctors’ offices, restaurants, mortuaries – everywhere,” said Tim Cox, chairman of the board of Texas Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center.

The glasses undergo a process Cox calls the “rough sort.” During this stage, trash and old cases are discarded.

After the rough sort, remaining frames are inspected for condition and prescription strength.

A lensometer is used to determine the power and prescription of each lens by reading their thickness, strength and diameter, Cox said.

“If the prescription meets a specific criteria, a certain power that could be used on a mission trip, they’ll set that off to the side,” he said.

Evaluations by ophthalmologists and optometrists who have gone on missions are used to determine desirable prescriptions, Cox said.

Lenses that fail to meet the power criteria or are missing screws, arms or nose pads are set aside and shipped to a metal recycling center in Los Angeles.

The remaining frames undergo a sanitation process before having prescriptions double-checked. They are then individually packaged into plastic bags, labeled according to prescription strength and packed into boxes with like-strength frames.

From there, Cox said the glasses are ready to be sent on missions and distributed to those in need.

Glasses can be taken on missions and distributed in Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Central America, Ken Gaherty said.

Providing vision care to all is one of the main initiatives fielded by the Lions Club, he said.

The initiative can be traced back to 1925 when Helen Keller delivered a speech at the Lions Club International Convention asking the Lions “to foster and sponsor the work of the American Foundation for the Blind.”

“She wanted the Lions to become the champions of the blind,” Ken Gaherty said.

In addition to the eyeglass donation program, the all-volunteer based Bayfield Lions Club offers up to $250 to Bayfield or Ignacio resident to help make vision correction accessible.

The group also runs a program called KidSight, in which preschoolers through first graders are screened for vision impairments.

“If you can catch the eye problem before 7 or 8 years old, it’s reversible,” he said. “After 7 or 8 years old, things like lazy eye are irreversible.”

Eyeglass donation bins can be found at several locations, including the Durango Walmart, Pagosa Library and Bayfield Lions Club.

“It’s a wonderful program,” Sue Ann Gaherty said. “Being able to give (someone) the opportunity to see. I’m sure there are a lot of people in this country who can’t afford glasses, and (there’s) people in other countries that probably don’t even know that something like that exists.”

lveress@durangoherald.com