In double-sided cardboard boxes 4 feet square, the books arrive by the ton. Moments later, as the books are sorted and then identified by a computer, they will either be tossed into a bin and sentenced to be recycled or they will be given a second life – sold on the Internet or donated to charity, and read again.

From a warehouse and processing plant in Lakewood – and from three other facilities in North America – Thrift Recycling Management in its most recent fiscal year sold or recycled 31 million pounds of books.

Eighty percent goes to pulp, sold for between $60 and $70 per ton. The rest goes online, selling for what readers will pay, or else the books – primarily meant for children – are donated to literacy charities.

At any one time, each plant has 500,000 individual titles for sale online at sites including, among others, Amazon.com, Half.com and eBay.com.

The books come from donations to thrift stores and nonprofit organizations, from schools and from publishers. And in the four years since Thrift Recycling Management was founded, books have been sent to buyers in 196 countries.

This isn’t quite what the founders had in mind when they met in a Puyallup living room nearly five years ago.

“Three of us worked for Value Village,” said Phil McMullin, Thrift Recycling Management CEO. Sensing an opportunity on the Internet, the group developed a business plan.

“We thought half of the business would be books, and the other half would be rags (clothing) and shoes,” McMullin said.

TRM sold its first book in June, 2004. By the second year, the company sold nine times the volume in books as compared to other products.

“We saw that this was the real opportunity,” McMullin said.

“Our experience to that point was in finding a home for clothing, shoes, bric-a-brac, different kinds of goods that were part of the waste stream,” says Clive Midgen, vice president of operations and one of the founders of TRM. “Books were available, and there wasn’t the kind of focus on books that there is today.”

The original four founders remain with the company, as does the original 10-member board of directors.

“It’s a thrill, no question,” McMullin says. “We had an idea, we tested it, it’s doing fine. This is a very exciting time for us.”

He has no illusion that TRM is a Rolls-Royce bookseller. “The right word is ‘waste stream,’” he says. “We help manage the waste stream.”

Books that previously might have gone to landfills are now recycled – or read. And just as the company is changing a part of the used book business, so the company itself has changed.

Often.

“We’re on our sixth midcourse correction in four years,” McMullin says.

One of the next corrections may concern that name: Thrift Recycling Management. It doesn’t really say: Books.

“It probably needs a rethink,” McMullin said.

A NEW KIND OF FAMILY

Within the pages of those tons of books come some surprises – forgotten currency used as bookmarks, old letters, photographs.

The workers who enter the names of the books into the TRM computers can keep whatever money they discover.

The photographs find their way onto Wayne Radick’s bulletin board.

“I’m a doorstep baby, and this is my family,” Radick says. He’s the production manager at TRM.

On the board there’s a photo of Queen Elizabeth and one of her corgi dogs. Two children, perhaps Afghani, stand in snow. People celebrate at a luau. A soldier stands ready and a high school graduate smiles. Families gather.

Along with money and photographs, Radick says, “you find a lot of books with marijuana inside.”

Across the warehouse floor, workers rake books from the bins and place the books into boxes, and the boxes take a ride on a conveyor. At each of a dozen computer stations, other workers take the boxes from the conveyor and remove each book.

If newer, books carry an ISBN identification number and bar code. The workers scan the code into the computer, or else, with older books, the worker types the title.

The computer – guided by an algorithm developed by TRM – decides whether the book should either be put up for sale or scrapped. The computer calculates the salability of each book. Are other books by that title for sale online? Does TRM have the same title in stock? How has that title sold in the past? Does the book weigh so much that the cost of shipping would make the price prohibitive?

If the book is deemed worthy, a printer issues a tracking card and the title is immediately, electronically offered for sale and sent to the stacks.

One day last week, among thousands of books, “The Bedford Introduction to Literature” goes into the discard tub. So does “The Juvenile Justice Process.”

Buyers buy TRM books at several Web sites, some owned by the company. Buyers can find TRM books on the general sites Amazon.com and eBay.com as well as the TRM sites greatbuybooks.com, hippobooks.com, owlsbooks.com and usedbooks123.com. The company also owns other sites – and plans to open more – that sell books and gifts and promote recycling and literacy.

Each processing plant operates its own sales site. At any one time, the company offers approximately 2.2 million books for sale.

There is no brick-and-mortar store. If you want to buy a book from TRM, you’ll need online access.

The most salable books, says McMullin, are those with a limited print run.

On this day, among the thousands of books waiting for USPS pickup, “If You Can Give a Mouse a Cookie” is bound for Virginia. “Criminal Justice Today” is headed for New Jersey. A pair of Thomas Kinkade novels wait to leave for Kentucky.

LOOKING AHEAD

In July, TRM acquired Discover Books of Abbotsford, B.C. Discover had been Canada’s largest book recycler, annually selling more than 600,000 titles.

“We are well positioned to increase sales and continue our growth trend,” said a TRM news release.

Today, annual sales reach some $20 million.

“We think we can get to $200 million,” McMullin said.

Most of that growth, he believes, will come with the purchase of other companies. “The heavy lifting will have to come through acquisition.”

The lifting continues, as the company today has an offer on the table to acquire a major recycler.

At the beginning of October, McMullin announced that the company had hired a chief financial officer, Louise Kobuke Anderson, a former banker and consultant specializing in financial analysis and strategic planning.

“It’s very exciting,” Anderson says. “The idea of being nimble, being able to respond to the moment, is great. It’s one of the keys to success. I think this is a great business model. I loved the green focus, and the focus on charitable giving.”

Over the next few months, she’ll conduct the company’s first full professional audit.

“In December we’ll look for additional capital,” McMullin says.

Over the next few years, he expects to expand geographically and perhaps expand the company’s product line.

“There are other things we can do with the waste stream,” he says. “The retail piece, the export piece. There are lots of international opportunities. I see us in supply-stream management.”

Because the company has built its own IT infrastructure, and because it has built its own niche, there isn’t a great deal of competition. The larger players in books – Amazon and eBay – provide platforms and have other avenues to profit.

The smaller players aren’t bothered.

Maureen Smith manages Tacoma Book Center, on East 26th Street near the Tacoma Dome.

“They buy books by the pound. We don’t consider them competition,” she says. “They’re no competition to a brick-and-mortar (bookstore). I think they fill a niche by helping books not end up in the landfill.”

At Tacoma Book Center, she says, any given day will see between 20 percent and 50 percent of gross sales over the Internet. People are more likely to find a rare or collectible book on a site such as hers, rather than at TRM.

“They will take things the rest of us can’t sell or won’t sell or won’t pay any money for,” she says.

“I think there’s always a prospect of competition,” says Midgen, director of operations and one of the founders. “Our philosophy has been to get as far ahead of the pack as possible, so whatever happens, we’re big enough and strong enough. It would be arrogant to say there won’t be any competition down the road.”

He continues, “I don’t see anybody that’s looked at it coast-to-coast. That’s also been a strength for us.

“We were entrepreneurs who saw a way to create revenue from things people were throwing away. We saw we could help schools and churches, it just dovetailed with the business. Promoting literacy has been one of the driving forces of our business.”

MORE THAN WORDS

“If you can ship a carton of books to Kenya – it may be the only books those children have,” McMullin says. “It would be criminal for us to throw away any book that could still have a life.”

He believes books are important for reasons greater than the words they contain.

“What’s the first great book people remember? For me, it’s ‘Ben the Wagon Boy.’ When I pick up that book, I remember my grandfather.”

He recalls asking a friend about that one special book. “He remembered ‘Plink Plink (Goes the Water in My Sink),’” a children’s book published in 1954.

“I’m gong to send it to him. We all have an emotional connection to books. That’s the emotional reward. If we only work for dollars, it’s a dismal world. When kids read, they’re more likely to be successful. Literacy is an easy thing for us.”

At a previous job, McMullin says, his company sent some 12 million pounds of books to landfills every year.

Then came the Internet, and from the new opportunities came the idea for TRM. Not that people shared the vision of McMullin and his partners.

“I’ve got 10 million books to sell. They couldn’t get their heads around it,” he says. “There was incredible skepticism. It goes back to the mystery and amazement of the Internet. It’s a goose-pimple thing,” he says.

“I’m a practical guy, but I’m willing to take a risk.”

C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535

blogs.thenewstribune.com/business

Thrift Recycling Management

Headquarters: Lakewood

Four processing plants: Lakewood, and near Chicago, Atlanta and Vancouver, B.C.

Consolidation/collection centers: Near Phoenix, Boston and Salt Lake City

Future plans: Next year, open four more consolidation centers. Expand by acquiring at least two related companies. Seek financing for expansion.

Book sales: Online only By the Numbers Annual sales Books sold in latest fiscal year Employees Pounds of books the company bought in the latest fiscal year Percent of books coming in that are recycled into pulp Books given to a children’s literacy program in 2007 Approximate amount of the company’s original capitalization Thrift Recycling Management books for sale online at any time Annual IT development costs Largest number of orders filled in one day