60 Seconds with… Claudia Freed, President and CEO, EALgreen

Claudia Freed, EALgreen

Title: President and CEO

Location: Wheaton, Ill.

Mission: To provide scholarships to deserving students through the donation of excess inventory.

Modern: EALgreen recently was honored with the Green Logistics Award by the Reverse Logistics Association (RLA) for your innovative alternative for returns and excess and end-of-life inventory. Tell us about the organization.

Freed: EALgreen was founded as a non-profit in the early 1980s to provide a way for companies to earn a tax credit for donating excess inventory and for those donations to fund scholarships for deserving students. We call it product philanthropy. Today, we are a 501(c)(3).

Modern: How did the organization get started?

Freed: In 1982, Verlyn Roskam, one of our founders, wanted to pay forward the gift of a college scholarship he had received 30 years earlier. He and Dan Mikelson, his co-founder, read a business article about companies overloaded with inventory. They thought: Why not ask them to donate their excess inventory to colleges that can use it? The donors would receive a tax benefit, the colleges would receive equipment they needed, and students could get scholarship equal to the value of the donated goods. Our first donor was W.W. Grainger.

Modern: Who was the first scholarship recipient?

Freed: I was! I was a student at North Park University who had come to the United States from Argentina as an 18-year-old with $36 in my pocket. I was studying economics and was deemed to have potential. I joined the organization as executive director in 1995.

Modern: What products will you take?

Freed: It’s easier to explain what we don’t take. We don’t take perishable products, but we can connect donors with large food banks. We don’t take hazardous materials. We don’t take anything with a license plate, like automobiles or trucks, or anything that has been titled to someone else, like real estate. We are not a global entity, so we don’t take anything from outside the United States. Otherwise, we accept anything that could be used to run a college or university campus.

Modern: What’s the scope of your operations?

Freed: We have two distribution centers in Rockford, Illinois and in California. And, we have our own transportation department. We use a number of modes, including intermodal, and we arrange back hauls so we can minimize the empty miles that a truck is going to drive. We get 500 to 700 trailer loads a year—I get excited when someone calls and says I have 17 trailer loads of excess product.

Modern: Your award from RLA was for sustainable logistics. Along with minimizing empty miles, how do you do that?

Freed: Let’s start with the E in ESG. We have a business model that looks to extend the useful life of a product, repair it, repurpose it or recycle it. Take a lawnmower, which is something a college will use. If it’s in working condition, we can sell it as is to a college. If it fails that test, it may be eligible for the repair channel or the repurpose channel, where it goes to another charity. Or, we sell it in a non-profit channel and pocket the cash. If all else fails, we can recycle it, which has become a bigger source of revenue for us. The S, by the way, is social impact, and that comes when student bills are reduced.

Modern: How much is donated from your activities?

Freed: Last year, we generated scholarships for 1,100 students at an average of $2,300 per student. We’ve served more than 21,000 students. Last year, we also donated $1,250,000 from our activities, like selling into the marketplace channel, and have donated $6 million over the last 10 years.

For more information visit www.ealgreen.org.