Every spring, Boston University’s move-out season generates a high volume of waste. For years, BU’s Goodwill, Not Landfill has grown into a campus-wide initiative diverting gently used household items, along with unopened non-perishable food to the wider community. Given the constraints of being a large urban university, space is always limited, so our office has historically diverted these used items to organizations in Greater Boston. Historically, we at BU Sustainability did not have the space or staffing to store hundreds of thousands of pounds of used goods, so undergraduate move-out donations went straight to outside partners. While this has proven successful, as members of the Zero Waste team, we have always wanted to find a way to repurpose donated items within our own community.
That question became the seed for a new initiative: The Graduate Student Giveaway.
Why Graduate Students?
Unlike undergraduates, most graduate students live in apartment-style university housing, meaning they have more room to begin furnishing their own spaces. Their move-in and move-out schedules also work in the program’s favor: graduate housing turns over in two waves, with one group moving out in early summer and a new group moving in during the first few weeks of August. That gap means a lighter volume of donations for us to store, for a much shorter window of time, before handing items off to an audience that genuinely needs them.
Graduate students are also the largest user group of the BU Food Pantry, which is another reminder of just how real the need for accessible, low-cost essentials can be.
From Parking Lot to Pop-Up Shop
We launched the Graduate Student Giveaway last year as a small pilot, with a single storage container in a parking lot, stocked with move-out leftovers for grad students to sort through.
This year, the program grew substantially. With the help of Campus Planning and Operations, we successfully transformed an entire floor into a temporary “thrift store,” open over two afternoons, where students could browse and take home whatever they needed free of charge to furnish their new apartments and rooms.
The giveaway opened with more than 4 tons of donated goods available to students. From clothing and household essentials to other useful items, the event helped to keep thousands of pounds of materials in circulation, rather than in the landfill. Our team is exploring potential ways to continue repurposing donated items on campus, including the possibility of hosting another giveaway event in the future.