• A Lille company has entered the refurbished eyewear market.

  • Old frames are collected and refurbished in an integration workshop.

  • The glasses are offered at reduced prices and can be fitted with corrective lenses.

There are still unexplored niches in zero waste: no one in France had ever thought of entering the refurbished glasses market.

In parallel with her studies in economics at the Catho in Lille, Ophélie Vanbremeersch first created, in 2020, a website called Les Glasses de Zac.

"I started from the observation that we all had a few old pairs of glasses lying around at the bottom of a drawer," explains the young designer of 20 years.

The manna would still reach nearly 100 million pairs, in France alone!

The collections were first organized within the university network and a few companies.

The young woman then knocked on the door of the BNP Paribas bank, which now allows her to have 174 collection points in bank branches.

The glasses are reconditioned by AlterEos, a company adapted to the employment of people with disabilities, based in Tourcoing.

"Four positions were created, knowing that each reconditioning takes between 15 to 30 minutes because the handling requires a lot of thoroughness", specifies Ophélie Vanbremeersch.

A thousand pairs of glasses reconditioned each month

Of the 1,000 or so glasses that are refurbished each month, 40 to 50% will go to developing countries for humanitarian missions “because they are no longer really up to date”.

About 10% will be sacrificed on the altar of formation.

The rest is put back on sale on the Internet from 19 euros, pending the inauguration of the store, which is scheduled to open on May 19, at L'Usine de Roubaix.

"We can thus afford a pair of Ray Bans, in perfect condition, for 49 euros", takes Ophélie Vanbremeersch for example.

The collection is also available with a recycled material version, such as shellfish and crustaceans.

For people whose sight requires correction, this is not a problem.

Zac Glasses are supplied from a French glassmaker, in partnership with the optician Antoine Lamblin, to assemble corrective lenses for you in forty-eight hours.

And to go to the end of the zero waste approach, even the glass assembly machine has been reconditioned!

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