What do they do with the chess sets after a tournament?

Do they re-use, donate or sell them?

Always wondered about this.

Thanks :)

Referring to big tounaments like the Blitz championship.

i'm guessing that they re-use them

 They float them downstream on the chessboards on the nearest river and fire flaming arrows at them in the style of a viking funeral.

@OP most people supply their own equipment so it doesn't belong to the organizers. If the organizer supplies the equipment they can do as they wish. If its an important match they may choose to sell the set to a collector or give the set as a prize. Otherwise they would likely keep the set and reuse it in their next event.

After kids tournaments they should disinfect them

The boards, or the kids?

In 2009, I organized the Washington State Elementary Chess Championship. For this event, we bought 650 chess boards (specially printed) and 650 sets of pieces. We also bought 60 clocks.

We sold about 100 sets at the event. We donated ten sets to any school in the area that requested them. Several hundred sets were distributed in this way.

We kept the clocks and several dozen chess sets.

Prior to this event, running a local scholastic tournament always involved a few phone calls to other coaches with the request that they bring their school's sets so that we would have enough. Finding enough clocks was always a challenge. We let games start without clocks, then put clocks on remaining games 40 minutes into the round. The time control is game 30. When clocks are put down 40 minutes in, each player gets 10 minutes. 

Since 2009, the commemorative sets from the state tournament have been used at all my scholastic tournaments. Older, and often slower players, always start with clocks because we now have enough.

When we ran the same event in 2015, we printed 150 new boards. One of my tournament bags has 10 commemorative sets from 2009 and ten from 2015. Another bag has a dozen from 2009. Those two bags are sufficient for up to 64 players. There are still two boxes with a dozen sets each available where I coach. These are sets that we only use at tournaments.

Before 2009, chess sets seemed scarce. Now, we have more than we ever use. 

Thanks for the response guys!

@ziryab: Interesting piece of info there 

Yes

nothing