During the student lease turn-over process, residents on the UW-Madison campus may find themselves left with unwanted items as they move from one location to the next.
An estimated 20,000 students will participate in the moving process over the next two weeks. During this time last year, the city of Madison Streets and Recycling picked up 1.1 million pounds of move-out waste. This year, the UW-Madison Office of Sustainability has teamed up with organizations including Goodwill, Society of St. Vincent de Paul and the city to create the Moving Days coalition.
Moving Days is an event that takes place Aug. 12-17 at several locations around Madison that aims to reduce waste on the streets and reuse or recycle unwanted items left by students.
Goodwill has donation bins in high-rise apartments around campus, while St. Vincent de Paul has a stationary U-Haul site where items can be dropped off and donated.
Students can find designated locations for the event on the UW Office of Sustainability Facebook page or by visiting their website.
This year the UW-Madison campus organizations involved in Moving Days have emphasized keeping resources on campus to make the event easier for students to access. The campus sites are run by the UW Office of Sustainability, We Conserve and the Open Seat Food Pantry, all three of which are UW-Madison affiliated.
We Conserve primarily handles the electronic recycling, or “e-waste,” of broken or unwanted electronics, while Open Seat collects and hands out food donations. The Office of Sustainability organizes the “Donate and Take Tent,” a space that takes in items students no longer want, and allows for the exchange of items students may need.
“It keeps resources on campus and available to students who need them,” said Anna Ostermeier, an intern for the UW-Madison Office of Sustainability. “It’s an immediate exchange, a free store, and there definitely is a student need for some of those unwanted items.”
Moving Days has grown since its first event in the 1990s and has slowly gained more involvement and publicity, and this year, a major push to market the event has taken place.
Madeline Fischer, the UW-Madison communications intern for the Office of Sustainability, created Moving Days’ first ever social media marketing with four paid Facebook advertisements.
“It has been neat, seeing what kind of messaging gets people to want to change their behavior and not leave things on the curb,” said Fischer. “It is my job to find out, ‘Ok how can we get them to come to this event and give their stuff to people who need it.'”
UW-Madison student Harrison Colcord, currently moving out of the Equinox apartment building and into a house on North Carroll Street, admitted he was planning to leave quality items on the curb since his new place comes fully furnished.
“I don’t need my dresser, bed frame, desk, so I need to find a place for those to go,” Colcord said.
After having learned about Moving Days, however, Colcord expressed interest in the event.
“I will definitely participate if my parents don’t have room for my stuff in their car,” Colcord said.
Both Fischer and Ostermeier expressed the importance of helping the greater Madison community throughout the process and the pleasure in working with the individuals who make Moving Days possible.
“One part of Moving Days is to keep the streets of Madison clean and keep things out of the landfill,” Fischer said. “But there are also these things that are being thrown away and wasted, that people can actually use, and there are people who need to use them.”
They said the scale of help and teamwork by the organizations involved are necessary in accomplishing the collective goals set out for the event.
“I also believe there is an underlying matter here and that is the issue of consumption in general,” Ostermeier said. “We need to be more conscious of whether or not we actually need the items we purchase, in the first place.”
