Making Move-Out Day Greener

Dealing with the debris left behind on college and university campuses after students leave for the summer is as much of a ritual as finals.

With the emphasis on sustainability in recent years, most institutions are tackling the issue head on with collection bins in which students can leave unwanted items. Usually the focus is on clothing, unopened food, and household furnishing, but Bryant University (R.I.) has added textbooks to the mix.

Project Tanzania is a volunteer initiative at Bryant University through which students collect used textbooks and ship them to universities in Tanzania. Bryant sophomore Chris Brida was just honored as one of the nation’s five “Liberty Mutual Responsible Scholars” for his work to expand involvement in the project to other colleges/universities in Rhode Island. 

“Project Tanzania is basically an effective recycling program,” Brida says. “At the end of every semester, we collect textbooks that students are not able to send back to the bookstore, sort them, stamp them, box them up and then send them to universities in Tanzania." 

Last semester, Brida and classmates in one of his management courses helped collect more than 800 textbooks from Bryant, Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island College, Providence College and the University of Rhode Island. “The biggest need is for art, engineering, medicine and law books, so we worked to fill these requests,” he says. 

Usually the abandoned objects don't travel so far. Sometimes they are resold the following semester in an on campus store to help make move-in day more affordable, as is the case at St. Lawrence University (N.Y). When we wrote about the program last year, we learned students are also given advice on arriving green as well. Other campuses donate the items to local charities. Lafayette College (Pa.) President Daniel Weiss shares his suggestions for move-out day greener in this article.

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Six local charities benefited, including a homeless shelter, a food pantry, and an animal shelter. This “green move-out” helped our neighbors and promoted positive town-gown relations—as well as saved us the costs of hauling these good items away as trash.