Lions Clubs International runs a long-standing eyeglass recycling program. When your prescription changes or you get new eyeglasses, you drop off your old pair at a collection box in your community and it’s matched to a senior on welfare or school child or adult trying to build a livelihood in a developing country.
But in 2001, the program inspired a budding inventor to change millions of lives.
Saul Griffith, now a lauded inventor and recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, was then just a grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Instead of spending his summer doing research, he went to Guyana through the Midland Texas Lions Club to sort, match, and distribute donated eyeglasses. When he had to give a pair of rhinestone-studded, bright pink glasses to a burly local man–a towering figure at 6 feet 3 inches–he decided that there must be a better way.
Eager to find a more effective way to afford others the expensive op portunity to see clearly, Griffith developed a way to examine eyes and print lens for eyeglasses in five minutes for just $5 a piece, even in the middle of rural Africa.
Though it’s impossible to get an exact figure, experts estimate that at least one billion need but can’t afford prescription eyeglasses. Without the foresight of the Lions Club to set up the eyeglass recycling program, the financial support of its members to send volunteers to Africa to distribute the glasses, and the donated prize money to help Griffith start a company to manufacture his creation, those billion people would still have no option for correct eyesight.
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