At Princeton, our school years are bracketed by an unfortunate pair of rituals. At the end of each year, students toss clothing, electronics and furniture in dumpsters around campus because they are too difficult or expensive to store during the summer. Yet at the beginning of each year, these same students make a run on local big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Target and Linens N' Things to restock their dorm rooms with many of the same items they threw out the previous spring.
While this kind of wastefulness may please retail stores, the consequences for the rest of us are much less fortunate. Not only are these all-too-common practices contributing to landfills and consuming natural resources each year, they needlessly burn up money that students can spend in much more useful ways.
But this waste-and-money problem has been remedied at other schools around the country, and there is no reason why the same cannot be done at Princeton. With a little student initiative, a program could be created to collect and store items which, otherwise, would have ended up in dumpsters around campus. The items that are collected can then be resold to students in the fall.
In fact, Dump & Run, Inc. — a nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts — runs programs like this one at 21 colleges and universities including Bowdoin and Cornell. The national organization assists with setting up and running the program, while local Dump & Run chapters collect and sell clothing in both the spring and fall. After Dump & Run takes a cut, the proceeds of their sales go toward local charities. Princeton could use a preexisting program like Dump & Run or create its own program. Existing student groups, sororities and club sport could even use this model as a means of fundraising.
Basic economics says that students who are willing and able to pay for a new futon each year have weighed the costs and benefits of their decision. But a program like Dump & Run has a good chance of changing their calculations. This is our call to students, especially underclassmen looking for a new project: can someone step up and address this issue, perhaps in time for move-out 2007?
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