Yard Sale Begins the Recycling of End-of-Semester Cast-Offs
Contact: Timoth Sylvia, 299-6250; George Manlove, 581-3756
ORONO – Stuck with tons of furniture, electronic equipment, appliances, clothing and food left in dormitories when nearly 4,000 students vacated campus housing in mid-May, UMaine Property Management is hoping a two-day yard sale May 26-27 will help reduce the refuse to be donated to charity or trashed.
Departing students loaded cars, trucks and vans with personal possessions, but they left behind more than 82 tons of refuse ranging from reusable, recyclable items to outright trash, says Gordon Nelson, director of Property Management for Auxiliary Services.
Property Management, which oversees the UMaine Green Campus Initiative, this year partnered with the Student Employment and the Bodwell Volunteer Center, formerly the Student Employment and Volunteer Services, to dispose of left-behind computers, microwave ovens, vacuum cleaners, rugs, carpets, shelves, furniture and other items in as efficient a manner as possible, Nelson says.
“The goal is to try and recycle as many of the resources as possible,” adds Lyn Dexter, assistant director of Student Employment and the Bodwell Volunteer Center.
As much as 1,000 pounds of non-perishable food items are being donated to Crossroads Resource Center in Old Town, which maintains a soup kitchen and food bank. What the university can use – the equivalent of nearly 100 gallons of laundry detergent, for instance – is separated out and used by university staff for institutional purposes. Hundreds of articles of clothing, some still new, previously have been donated to thrift stores from one end of the state to the other, says Dexter.
This year, she and Nelson hope to lighten the load with an indoor yard sale at the Wilson Center campus ministry. Yard sale proceeds will go to a fund for members of the Wilson Center Christian Student organization to help with travel expenses for student missions to foreign countries during spring break, according to Timoth Sylvia, minister at the Wilson Center.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity that Green Campus is letting the students do this,” Sylvia says.
After the yard sale, what’s left will be donated to thrift shops around the state, since there typically has been too much to donate to a single thrift shop, Dexter says.
Nelson says that while Green Campus tries to reuse or recycle as much as possible, the university still faces almost 50 tons of refuse that can be incinerated and more than 32 tons that cannot be incinerated and must be hauled to a landfill.
Incineration, he says, “is a more environmentally responsible way to deal with it.”
Property Management and custodial staff members who go through dormitories to clean after students depart often find what’s left behind varies, as do conditions of the rooms, Nelson says.
“Some rooms you open up and they look brand spanking new and others you open up and they look like a tornado hit,” he says. Among the salvageable, he says, “I saw lamps, computers and an air conditioner.”
Nelson says he expects the volume of refuse that has to be burned in trash-to-energy plants or land-filled will diminish as the university continues to streamline its recycling efforts.
The yard sale at the Wilson Center at 67 College Ave. in Orono, is from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
This spring, seven members of the Christian student organization went to Nicaragua, where they helped build a church, accompanied a medical mission to remote villages and worked to strengthen relationships with members of the communities in which they stayed or worked. Students raise their own money for travel expenses and the yard sale will help in that effort, Sylvia says.