Mary McMurtery, an art teacher from Providence, unravels a piece of rolled paper she and her students will use for a project. The paper comes from Recycling for Rhode Island Education, a nonprofit organization that takes castoffs from businesses and sells them to educators at a discount. Teachers and students rifle through the discards, looking for items that can be glued, stapled, painted, pieced together or counted as part of some educational exercise.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

PROVIDENCE

Bad business can be good for some people.

“We get all this sort of cool stuff,” said Kathleen Samways. “It’s a bad buy, it’s a bad lot . . . the manufacturing process went wrong.”

Samways is cofounder of Recycling for Rhode Island Education, a nonprofit organization focused on finding ways to use the detritus of business.

Around her are shelves, barrels and bins full of notebook dividers, polyurethane disks, corrugated cardboard, bolts of fabric, plastic tubes, jar covers and other miscalculations of people and machinery.

“We just recently got a burst [of material] from a company that has relocated and expanded,” Samways said.

The material was left behind by a previous tenant at the property, she added.

Stuff like that often ends up in a landfill somewhere, but about 100 companies benefit from their partnership with Samways’ organization. They donate the unwanted items to help open space in their own warehouses, clear up their balance sheets and pile up charitable deductions.

“If we start to get a little buildup, we’ll call them up,” said Mel Cournoyer, the plant manager at New England Paper Tube Co., in Pawtucket. “[RRIE] helps us get rid of the waste.”

The company makes specialized cardboard tubes for military and industrial uses that have, particularly in the military, exacting standards, Cournoyer said.

“They’re stringent with their specifications,” he said of the military. “The tube might be off a couple of a thousandths of an inch” and be deemed unusable.

New England Paper Tube generates from 10 to 20 tons of cardboard waste per month, he said, most of which is recycled. Workers set aside some of the cardboard for RRIE.

RRIE trucks pick up the cardboard, about 300 pounds at a time, and bring it to the organization’s 7,000-square-foot warehouse off Elmwood Avenue, near the Providence/Cranston border.

And there it becomes the stuff of dreams for imaginative people.

Educators and students rifle through the discards, looking for items that can be glued, stapled, painted, pieced together or counted as part of some educational exercise.

There’s an annual fee, starting at $60 for an individual, which entitles members to a certain amount of free material, after which they pay 30 cents a pound.

“We really try to seek out colorful textures,” Samways said. “Does it bounce? Does it float? Does it stretch? Can it be counted?

“It’s like Christmas in here every day.”

Lately, it’s been a bit like the month after Christmas at the mall. There are some bare spots as donations are down this year.

“We are, like everybody else, in a spot because of the downturn in the economy,” Samways said.

Companies are making fewer goods, she said, so there are fewer production mistakes.

That’s the case at New England Paper Tube, according to Cournoyer.

“Right now, we’re pretty slow,” he said, and the company cut its factory work force by about one-third.

Previously, some companies tossed out or donated damaged goods, Samways said, but in a bad economy, that’s less often the case.

“Now, if [a] box broke, they might fix it,” she said.

But sometimes it’s the company that’s broke.

“We’ve ended up getting stuff when [a] company is closing,” Samways said. “That’s the sad news.”

pgrimald@projo.com