This year, Save a Sample! returns for an expanded second Canadian edition. Following last year’s inaugural event in Quebec, Montreal, and Vancouver, the recycling drive expands to five Canadian cities, with Toronto and Winnipeg joining the roster. Held on September 20th and 21st, the two-day recycling drive allows students to make use of the material samples that would otherwise be discarded by designers.
The non-profit, international recycling drive that facilitates the donation of materials and samples to local design students preventing “tons” of materials from going to landfill. Every year, Save A Sample! creates a second life for unused brochures, fabrics and finish cards. With boxes of discarded samples simply picked up by the Save a Sample! teams, designers are given an easy way to donate their unneeded materials to local design schools, giving students a more professional set of resources to work with, while reducing their ecological footprint.
Founded in the U.S. in 1999, the Save a Sample! drive — which has become well-established in major design markets like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — has consistently grown in the years since, expanding to Canada in 2016. Over the years, thousands of pounds of materials have been donated by some of the country’s busiest design firms. The materials are delivered to local design schools with the help of local furniture dealers. As a result, talented students have a much richer set of resources to choose from during the year.
“We’re going global,” said Suzanne Swift, Save A Sample!’s founder and president of SpecSimple.com (the industry’s first web portal for design industry information and the home of Virtual Library, a Best of NeoCon GOLD award winner), celebrating the drive’s Canadian expansion last year. This fall, Canadian designers will have a greater opportunity to donate their materials to schools and their students. In particular, the addition of a Toronto event introduces Save a Sample! to Canada’s biggest design market and population, expanding the drive’s potential.
Donations can include, but are not limited to the following:
– carpet samples (loose samples only, 12 x 12 or smaller. No carpet books.)
– fabric samples (memo samples only, no chain sets)
– glass samples*
– tile samples*
– stone samples*
– metal samples
– wood samples
– laminate samples
More information is available via the Save a Sample! Canada website, linked here.