A Campus Recycling staff member sorts through items donated by OSU students as they moved off campus in June. Contributed photo.

Oregon State University students moving out of campus residence halls in June donated more than 20,122 pounds of housewares, food and other items that would otherwise have ended up in area landfills.

The amount beat last year’s record of 17.558 pounds and exceeded organizers’ goal to collect 20,000 pounds this year. The annual Residence Hall Move-Out Donation Drive collected, by category:
• 7,932 pounds of housewares
• 5,252 pounds of clothing, linens and shoes
• 4,421 pounds of reusable scrap wood
• 2,517 pounds of food, toiletries and school supplies
• 571 pounds of e-waste that was recycled (a new category of items that was accepted this year)

While a portion of the donations go to the OSUsed Store, the majority went to local nonprofits, including Linn Benton Food Share, The Cat’s Meow Thrift Shop, Love INC of Benton County and others.

The donation drive is coordinated by OSU Campus Recycling, Surplus Property, and University Housing and Dining. This year 27 volunteers put in 83 hours of work collecting and sorting the donations.
To help students contribute to the donation drive, every room was provided with a move-out kit – color-coded bags in which to sort and an instructional door hanger – and donation bins were placed in every hall’s lobby. Recycling bins were also placed in lobbies, and picked up more frequently to accommodate extra material.

“When all of these parties come together – students, OSU departments, volunteers and non-profits – it’s amazing how much we can capture that is no longer needed, and channel that to people who do need it,” said Andrea Norris, outreach coordinator for Campus Recycling and Surplus Property. “It benefits OSU and our entire community.”

For more information on the donation drive, visit http://recycle.oregonstate.edu.

Items were sorted by type before being distributed to local charities. (contributed photo)

When Oregon State University students moved out of their residence halls in June, they left behind them thousands of pounds of clothing, furniture and other no-longer-needed items. But instead of filling up dumpsters, the annual OSU residence hall donation drive successfully collected 17,558 pounds of material for people in need, beating the 2010 record.

Campus Recycling, Surplus Property and University Housing and Dining work together to collect the discarded material each year, depending on the initiative of students to sort and donate their unwanted items rather than tossing them in the garbage.

“This not only addresses the environmental impact of landfilling the material, but also provides an opportunity to give back to the community,” said Andrea Norris, outreach coordinator for Campus Recycling and Surplus Property.

This year, organizers hoped to beat their 2010 record of 11,651 pounds. They managed to collect 1.5 times as much.

Seventeen community members volunteered to help with collection, receiving, sorting and donating the material, helping make the donation drive a success. Volunteers contributed approximately 70 hours, critical in a time when the student work force is sparse during finals week.

While a small portion of the items were sold by OSU Surplus Property to recoup the costs of the donation drive, the majority of donations went to Benton Habitat for Humanity, Calvary Chapel of Corvallis, Corvallis School District, Goodwill, Linn Benton Food Share, Love INC, and the Vina Moses Center.

“The shoes were especially appreciated by our clients,” said Wilma Van Schelven, director of Love INC of Benton County, “They went to homeless citizens, pastors who live on low incomes and school coaches who need athletic shoes for students who are unable to afford them.”

In addition to shoes, other donated materials included clothing, bedding, unopened food and toiletries, school supplies, scrap wood and housewares. Students were provided with color-coded bags for sorting donations into bins in each residence hall’s lobby.

“We were so impressed and appreciative of our students, who took time out of their busy finals week schedules to sort and donate,” Norris said.

For more information on the donation drive, visit http://recycle.oregonstate.edu.