A 60-year-old woman from Iguala, Mexico, views her surroundings. Everything around her seems so different than it did only minutes before. Everything looks so . . . clear. For the first time in her life, she sees the individual leaves in the trees, the various subtle colors of the birds flying overhead and the beautiful facial features of her granddaughter. She blinks back the tears that have come, as she is overwhelmed with the gift that she has just been given.

An inmate at Westville Correctional Facility (WCF) in Westville, Indiana, carefully places a pair of eyeglasses under the electronic lens of his lensometer and waits as the machine processes the glasses and gives him a readout containing the prescription of the eyeglasses. He carefully recites the prescription to a fellow inmate who transcribes the prescription onto a clear plastic bag and places the eyeglasses inside. A brief smile appears on his face as he imagines the eventual recipient of that particular pair of glasses, but without further delay he starts the process over with a different pair of eyeglasses.

The connection between the two? The Eyeglass Recycling Program of Lions Multiple District 25. Started in 1994 at the Westville Correctional Facility in Northwest Indiana, the highly-successful Eyeglass Recycling Program has been the result of a series of ventures and projects involving the Lions of Indiana (specifically, the Lions of District 25-A) and the Indiana Department of Correction. By combining the efforts of hundreds of dedicated Lions and a group of inmates who are looking to make reparations to society, the Eyeglass Recycling Program has become a working model for other districts and jurisdictions to emulate. 

The process starts with the donation of used eyeglasses, whether through the collection efforts of an individual club or through the hundreds of eyeglass collection boxes that have been strategically placed throughout the Northwest Indiana region. The eyeglasses are then gathered and brought to Lion Lowell Bucher at the Lions eyeglass facility located in Wanatah. Bucher then separates the glasses that are broken or scratched beyond repair from those eyeglasses that can be used. Last year alone, he sorted over 380,000 pair, for a total of more than 2 million in the last 10 years.

After the sorting, those eyeglasses that are found to be usable are then shipped to the Eyeglass Recycling Center at WCF.  Upon arrival, the glasses are then sorted a second time, this time separating the glasses into five basic categories: men’s single lenses, men’s bifocal lenses, women’s single lenses, women’s bifocal lenses and children’s lenses. The glasses are then washed, dried and prepared for the next step in the process, the reading of the prescription by the lensometer. The five lensometers currently in use at the Eyeglass Recycling Center were purchased through a combination of local club donations and LCIF grants. The glasses are then placed under the electronic lens of the lensometer that “reads” the glasses’ prescription to the operator. He, in turn, provides that information to a fellow inmate who carefully transcribes the prescription onto a plastic bag.  

Each “team,” consisting of an operator and a transcriber, will process between 80 and 100 pairs of glasses in the course of an hour. The plastic bag in which each pair is placed not only protects the glasses from potential damage, but the data written upon it will also serve as the cataloging system by which the glasses will be quickly located and matched with the proper recipient during future eyeglass missions. In fact, as a testament to the philosophies of  ingenuity and teamwork of Lions throughout Indiana, Lion Charles E. Blake of District 25-B, as a tribute to the late PDG Dr. William Trubey, OD, an early supporter of the eyeglass missions, created a database program. It aids in the selection of the “best” pair of eyeglasses for a particular patient at a mission and  helps locate that particular pair amongst the tens of thousands of eyeglasses available at the mission. By combining Blake’s program with laptop computers that have been purchased through the donations of numerous Lions from Northwest Indiana, productivity has been dramatically increased. During the 2005 Eyeglass Mission to Iguala, for example, 10,418 patients were seen and treated. In past missions where this equipment was not available consisted essentially of the same time frame and same number of workers, but averaged approximately 8,000 patients. 

After being “read,” transcribed and placed into the plastic bag, the glasses are then packed in french fry boxes (donated by the local McDonald’s franchise) with other glasses of the same category, along with glasses bearing extremely high prescriptions, those with high cylinder readings (used to correct severe astigmatism), reading glasses and pairs which one lens has a positive correction while the other has a negative correction (often referred to as plus-minus or minus-plus glasses). 

All glasses are then taken to the Indiana Eyeglass Recycling Center in Upland. From there, they are transported to the Rockville Women’s Correction Facility where a group of volunteers will continue the sorting process and break the categories into even smaller differentiable groups, such as men’s single lenses with the right eye having a positive correction reading of between 100 and 175 or women’s bifocal lenses with the right eye having a positive correction reading of between 200 and 275, etc. They are then packed into boxes of 50 pair each and returned to Upland where they are shipped throughout the world.

The Westville Correction Center has been processing eyeglasses for over 10 years, reaching a total thus far of 2.5 million pairs. Currently, more than 10,000 are  processed every week, with processing into the computer database beginning last spring. Last year, Lions donated over 950 hours doing data entry for the 40,000 pair needed for the mission to Iguala.  This year the inmates at Westville have taken over this task and are processing in excess of 1,000 pair into the computer every day. 

“To have a successful  Eyeglass Processing Center,” says Past International Director Gene Rice, “you must have a good relationship with the Correction Center, and we have that with Westville. We have had complete cooperation from Superintendent Bruce Jordan and all other officials involved in the program. We've come a long way in the past 10 years, to not only process glasses, but to have the ability to computerize them. We are now working on a repair center to utilize as many children’s glasses and hard to find prescriptions as possible.

“We honor each and every Lions club member who participates in Westville Correctional Facility’s Eyeglass Recycling program,” says Superintendent Jordan. “The recycling program is a welcome commodity at the facility, and the dedication of the Lions has exceeded our expectations.

“The Eyeglass Shop assists Westville in meeting numerous goals. It has afforded the facility and its inmates an opportunity to contribute positively to the community and helps to reduce the inmate idleness that plagues every correctional facility in America.

“This important program is operated solely through donations and through the volunteer efforts of our local Lions. We have recently moved the program to a larger area, assigned more workers and updated our technology in order to help the Lions expand their operation.”