Trash to treasure
14 June 2024
This is a great post from Bridge Michigan about how college towns are setting up programs that give perfectly usable appliances, furniture and other items that college students throw away to people who need them. You may want to establish a similar program at your college.
The last week of April was Chris Hewitt’s “Super Bowl.” It was move-out week for Michigan State University’s dorms, and 16,000 Spartans were heading out of East Lansing — and leaving behind trash, recyclables and discarded furniture.
By the end of the week, the operations manager of the Michigan State University Surplus Store and Recycling Center and his crew had “picked up 500,000 pounds of material from the residence halls,” he said.
And that was just from students living in on-campus housing.
Michigan college towns produce mountains of waste each spring as students move out of dorms and apartments and leave dumpsters and curbsides piled high with unwanted, but often perfectly usable, appliances, furniture and other items.
Now, some of those items are finding new homes thanks to college town organizations with a mission to reuse trash to benefit the community, including one program in Ann Arbor that is using discarded student furniture to furnish apartments for homeless people.
See the full article here.
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