Recycled Spectacles:

All the spectacles you kindly donate are collected by your local Lions Club as part of our annual Spectrek event. This year 124,000 pairs were collected by Lions Clubs across the south of England and delivered to the Lions Club of Chichester.They are then sorted by a team of Lions in a small workshop at the Apuldram Centre. Clubs across the rest of the UK collect and deliver spectacles to Chichester throughout the year in boxes and bags of all shapes and sizes where they are initially processed by Club members and other volunteers in the workshop.

Chichester Lions have considerable experience to select the items that are suitable for recycling and to sort them in preparation for onward transmission to Medico France in Le Havre. Medico France have the necessary equipment to clean and grade the spectacles ready for use in eye camps in Africa, India and Eastern Europe.

Chichester Lions have recently developed, with the help of the Inside Out Trust, facilities for grading spectacles in the UK and as a result are able to ship directly to Ghana, Papua New Guinea, Nepal and recently to Nigeria. In each case, the glasses are sent directly to known or Lions club contacts.

The Inside Out Trust in the UK also grade spectacles for us in two UK prisons using equipment provided by Chichester Lions. Graded spectacles are supplied to order to developing countries for use in clinics and eye hospitals.

Since our spectacles collecting campaign began back in the 1980's more than 2,204,000 pairs have been collected, cleaned, graded and distributed to the needy.

  

  Photo from Tamale in Ghana