South Philadelphia business receives about thousands of eclipse glasses to donate for recycling

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A South Philadelphia business started collecting glasses for a good cause following the eclipse in April.

The sustainable general store in East Passyunk, Good Buy Supply, has gone from a handful of pairs to over 3,500 glasses in just a couple of weeks. The owner, Emily Rodia, said shades poured in after the big celestial event.

“It’s our official last day of collection,” Rodia said on the final day of April.

The weight of the large box couldn’t even register on the store’s scale. Most pairs were used while others were brand new, some even still packaged.

Rodia said each one is a reminder of why extending the life of a single-use item is important.

“Recycling in general isn’t a perfect solution. So this is an item we all had to purchase, and we all wanted to find a way to get rid of it in the right way,” Rodia said.

Rodia will be waiting a bit before sending the glasses off to the company, Eclipse Glasses USA, which will then send them off to different parts of the world so they can be reused.

But after announcing they’d be collecting pairs, the message quickly spread through social media.

This led the company’s owner, Roger Sarkis, to call for a pause in donations as he tries his best to keep up with the large amount of mail he’s receiving.

“This is an amazing response,” Sarkis said. “I can’t remember the last time I heard about people being so generous with what is essentially trash.”

He estimates 100,000 pairs were donated.

The company is now asking the public to wait till the end of the summer to send any more ISO-certified glasses.

“There’s thousands of parcels of mail at the post office that I don’t have anywhere to put right now … but I still have the 20 pallets that I need to inspect,” Sarkis said.

After they’re inspected, pairs will be sent to kindergarten and eighth-grade students in Hawaii, Chile and Argentina for the upcoming eclipse in October. Some of the glasses will also head to parts of Africa for educational purposes.

“You can enable someone else to have the same feelings you had while seeing totality or annularity somewhere else across the world where it’s not as easy to procure these things,” Sarkis said.

It’s all in preparation for the next natural phenomenon all seen through shared lenses.

Marcella Baietto

Marcella Baietto is a bilingual reporter with CBS News Philadelphia. She’s originally from Phoenix, Arizona, but considers El Salvador her second home since much of her family still lives there.