Mail Donations To:
Eco Encore
Attn: Media Donations
900 1st Ave S, Suite #205-B
Seattle, WA 98134 What to Donate...and What NOT to Donate
We know our donors have the best of intentions when they send us items for resale - but when we receive stuff that's severely damaged or has no resale value, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to properly recycle these items or see them off to another organization that can use them.
We understand that it can be very hard to assess the potential value of items you want to give us. If you follow the general rules below, it's way more likely that the things you give us will help us in our mission to resell useful items and generate funding for environmental nonprofits.
The best guidance we can offer is this:
If you were shopping on Amazon.com, you came across the items you're about to donate to Eco Encore and you made a purchase, would you be pleased with the item you receive? If not, you may not want to send it our way.
Good items to donate to Eco Encore:
- CDs: any full retail version (not copies). No scratches, preferably with original liner notes.
- DVDs: any full retail version (not copies). No scratches, preferably in original case.
- Recent Software and Video Games: full retail versions on CD with a license, less than 2 years old.
- Books: all should be in excellent condition for resale. No ripped pages, excessive highlighting, warped or separated binding, mold/mildew/stains. Normal wear and tear is just fine; covers and pages may be worn at the edges. Best-selling categories include art, philosophy, spirituality / religion, any academic texts less than 5 years old, professional reference materials (i.e. medical, law, engineering, software development) and newer cookbooks. Uncommon titles tend to have the highest resale value!
Items To Avoid
The following items have very low resale values online, and are not good items to donate to Eco Encore:
- VHS Tapes of any kind.
- Paperback mass-marketed novels of any kind
- Outdated or common travel guides
- Almanacs, dictionaries, encyclopedias or thesauri
- Anything that is severely damaged
- Academic textbooks older than 10 years
- Software manuals
- Floppy disks, software more than 2 years old, cassette tapes or any other outdated electronics-related item.
Please contact us if you have any questions about what you plan to donate to Eco Encore.
Tax Deductions
The laws pertaining to personal deductions for charitable contributions have changed for 2007, both for cash and in-kind contributions. According to the IRS website, in order to receive a tax deduction for your contribution:
All cash contributions made to qualified charities including Eco Encore must be supported by a dated bank record or a dated receipt.
All clothing and household items (which we assume includes books, music, movies and software) must be in good used condition or better. As the IRS does not attempt to define "good used condtion" for us, we refer to Amazon.com because this is where we sell most of our inventory. Eco Encore will not send a receipt for items that do not meet or exceed Amazon.com's standard for Used items of Good Condition.
Print and fill out this donation sheet to accompany your donation.
Contact Eco Encore directly to request a receipt for your donation.
Visit Amazon.com's Guidelines for Determining Condition to decide if your intended donation is of Good or better quality.
Visit the IRS Tax Law Changes for Indiviuals page for further information.
