Fairfax County’s efforts to divert more waste away from landfills have taken a literary turn.
The county launched a book reuse and recycling program last month that encourages residents to drop any unwanted books into a green donation bin at the I-66 Transfer Station (4618 West Ox Road) near Fair Lakes.
The discarded books will be collected by New Legacy Books, a New Jersey-based company that sells and redistributes used books to benefit partner localities and nonprofit organizations that receive a portion of any sale proceeds.
Under its new pilot program, the Fairfax County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services (DPWES) will get 15% of the sales of books left in its bins, department spokesperson Sharon North says. The funds will be used to support residential recycling services.
Hardback and paperback books are both accepted, as are textbooks, though they all must have an ISBN barcode. Any books that can’t be resold due to their condition will be recycled, according to DPWES.
“The program offers the public a practical way to divert waste and supports the county’s long-term zero waste goal, which aims to divert 90 percent of the overall waste stream away from disposal,” DPWES said in a press release.
The resident book reuse program complements a similar initiative introduced last year by Fairfax County Public Library, which partnered with the online reseller ThriftBooks in May.
Like New Legacy Books, ThriftBooks either resells the delivered books and shares part of the profits with FCPL or recycles them at no cost to the county. Given that the library system has previously paid for books deemed no longer suitable for its collections to be recycled, both options have “a positive financial impact on the county,” FCPL Technical Operations Division Director Dustin Booher noted.
According to Booher, the library sometimes discards collection materials based on their condition, accuracy or insufficient demand.
From May to November 2025, the first six months of what’s planned to be a two-year pilot program, FCPL diverted more than 100,000 books to ThriftBooks, over 20,000 of which were determined to be eligible for reuse and resale.
“Over $20,000 was returned to FCPL which has been used for the purchase of materials for the collection,” FCPL spokesperson Sara Prohaska told FFXnow, adding that the partnership has already diverted 81 cubic yards of waste from landfills and saved 421,073 gallons of water, 1,444 trees and 246,629 kilowatts of electricity.
While $20,000 may not sound like much, it can make a difference for a library system that currently only receives $3 million in county funds for its collection materials.
In addition to utilizing the New Legacy Books bin, DPWES and FCPL encourage community members to donate books and other media, such as DVDs, to the Friends of the Library groups that regularly organize sales at local library branches.
“Library Friends groups are run by volunteers and they fund special library programs, Summer Reading Adventure entertainment, purchases of additional books, furniture, technology, and scholarships for community members and FCPL staff,” Prohaska said by email. “Over the course of FY2025, our Friends groups donated more than $369,660 and provided 37,297 hours of support to our system.”
The book reuse program’s launch came on the heels of the county expanding a textile recycling program that enables residents to drop off clothes and other fabrics for resale or repurposing. The collection bins provided by the company Helpsy can be found at the I-66 Transfer Station next to the new book bin and at the I-95 Landfill Complex (9850 Furnace Road) in Lorton.
