The Lions Club Eyeglasses Program

Recycle for Sight is the reason there is a small box for old glasses at your library, and it is the largest eyeglass recycling network in the world. This page covers the program itself: who runs it, what they will take, where the boxes are, and what actually happens to a pair of glasses after it goes in one. If you only want the nearest drop-off point, our guide to where to donate eyeglasses near you is the shorter answer.

1. What Recycle for Sight is

Recycle for Sight is Lions Clubs International's eyeglass recycling program. Lions, Leos, and other volunteers collect used eyewear throughout the year and deliver it to regional Lions Eyeglass Recycling Centers, known as LERCs, where volunteers do the work that turns a box of assorted glasses into something a clinic can use.

The program is volunteer-run from end to end. Nobody is paid to empty the box at your library, sort the contents, or read the prescriptions. That is worth knowing because it explains both the reach of the program and its pace: glasses you drop off this month are unlikely to reach anyone this year.

2. Where to drop glasses off

There are four routes, and they are not equally convenient depending on where you live.

1. Walmart Vision Centers. Lions Clubs International has a partnership with Walmart, and participating Vision Centers accept eyeglass donations. For most people this is the easiest option, since the store is open long hours and no club meeting schedule is involved.
2. A local Lions club. Not every club collects eyeglasses. Use the Club Locator on lionsclubs.org to find clubs near you, then ask whether they run a collection.
3. Community collection boxes. Lions-sponsored boxes turn up in libraries, schools, community centers, places of worship, coffee shops, and optometrists' offices. These are the boxes most people have seen without knowing what program they belong to.
4. Mail to a recycling center. If no local option exists, you can mail eyeglasses or unopened contact lenses directly to the nearest LERC. Lions Clubs International publishes the center list organized by country and state.

3. What Lions accept

• Eyeglasses, new or gently used, in any prescription
• Prescription sunglasses
• Regular sunglasses
• Contact lenses, unopened only. Sealed, in date, in the original packaging. Opened or partly used packs cannot be redistributed.
• Hearing aids, of any age, brand, or model

The hearing aid line surprises most donors, and it is the single most valuable thing on this page. Lions accept hearing aids with no age limit, which means the twenty-year-old pair in a drawer that no manufacturer will service is still worth passing on. If you have hearing aids to move on, see also where to donate hearing aids.

Two things worth checking rather than assuming. Eyeglass cases are generally not needed and mostly create bulk for volunteers to dispose of, so leave them at home unless a club asks for them. Badly damaged frames are handled differently by different clubs, since some centers can harvest usable lenses and others cannot, so ask the club rather than filling a box with broken pairs.

4. What happens after you drop them in the box

The chain is longer than most donors picture.

1. A club volunteer empties the box and cleans the glasses.
2. They are shipped to the nearest Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center.
3. At the LERC, volunteers sort them and determine the prescription strength of each pair, which is the slow, skilled part of the process.
4. Sorted glasses are packaged by prescription and held until a mission requests them.
5. They are distributed through humanitarian missions, nonprofit eye care organizations, optometry college groups, religious organizations, and military assistance groups.

Most recycled glasses go to low and middle income communities, frequently outside the United States. Lions Clubs International cites more than 150 million people worldwide living with blurred vision caused by uncorrected refractive error, which is the gap the program is aimed at.

5. Starting a collection point

Any business, school, or place of worship can host a box, and this is how the network grows. Contact a local club through the Club Locator and ask. Clubs generally supply the box and handle collection, so the host commitment is shelf space near an entrance.

This tends to be worth more than an individual donation. One box at a busy optometrist's reception desk collects more in a month than most households produce in a decade.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]

Why prescription sorting is the bottleneck

A donated pair of glasses is useless until someone knows what it corrects. Reading the prescription off an unmarked lens takes equipment and a trained volunteer, and it has to be done pair by pair. This is why recycling centers are regional rather than local, and why the gap between your drop-off and someone's fitting is measured in months.

It also explains the emphasis on wearable, complete pairs. A frame with one lens missing costs the same volunteer time to handle and produces nothing at the end of it.

The program compared with the other eyewear routes

Lions Recycle for Sight has the widest collection network and sends most glasses abroad. OneSight and retail optical chains run their own collections with different destinations. Local optometrists sometimes pass glasses to a nearby clinic directly, which is the fastest route from your drawer to someone's face but the hardest to find.

Our guide to where to donate eyeglasses near you lays the options side by side, including which ones take prescription lenses and which only want frames.