How UC San Diego started their dorm reuse program

UC San Diego did not need convincing that dorm reuse was worth doing. It had already tried, by hand. One member of the housing team tracked everything that came in and everything that went out on spreadsheets, and booked pickup appointments with students one at a time.

There was no system, and at the end there were no real numbers. Asked how many bed frames had come in, the honest answer was "pretty much just a guess." By the team's account, a defensible impact report took months to assemble and still rested mostly on estimates.

UC San Diego has added about 10,000 beds in a decade [3]. The Theatre District (2,000 students) and Pepper Canyon West (1,300) opened in 2024 [1], and Ridge Walk North moved in 2,400 more in fall 2025, taking campus housing to a record 22,000 [2]. Next is Pepper Canyon East, up to 2,000 beds in its first phase, targeted for summer 2029, and up to 6,000 when complete [4], on the way to a four-year housing guarantee [2].

Every one of those students moves out in the same week. They have to be out of their rooms within 24 hours of their last final, the same week as commencement, so without a robust system, thousands of perfectly good dorm essentials otherwise head for the roll-off bins. Each new building creates an opportunity to divert useful items from landfill, and makes a program that can handle it at scale more urgent.

Move-out reuse is not a side project. It lands on four commitments the campus is already measured against.

The pilot asked whether a small team could run move-out collection, summer cataloging and a move-in shop as one program, and come out of it with defensible data rather than estimates. Section 2 describes how the program ran (Appendix A explains how it was measured), Section 3 reports what it achieved, and Section 4 discusses what the results mean for the campus and for programs like it.

The pilot ran across 3 of UC San Diego's 8 undergraduate colleges. It was led by the campus Zero Waste Manager with staff from Sustainability and Housing, and run with two student groups: the EcoNauts and the Green Programs Interns, Eva and Riccardo, a collaboration across departments. Collection ran from May 22 to July 29, 2026; the move-in shop opened on August 26, and storefront orders ran from August 21 to September 23.

Staff, EcoNauts and Green Programs Interns hauled donations across campus, in wagons, carts, and trucks, into a storage room the neighborhood was designed with and planned as Student Needs Storage. That room is a lesson for future developments: finding space is the first obstacle to a reuse program, so building student needs storage into a building's design is what lets one start. Each item was then cataloged in ReDorm. Instead of manually weighing items and taking pictures, ReDorm's database of products made it so that inventorying was just a matter of finding the product and adding quantity. They had planned for it to take an entire summer with multiple people. Instead, it took one student, Eva, 4 days to track over 1600 items, about 1.2 tons of material.

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Over the summer the goods became a free shop under UC San Diego's own name. Students reserved items online and collected them in scheduled pickup slots during move-in week. There was no campaign: the link sat inside a move-in email.

The largest return was time. Cataloging 93% of the season's donations took four days, June 22 to 25, by one student working mostly from a phone. The same work by hand is modeled at 438 staff hours, about 11 weeks of one person's full-time work. The impact report, which had taken months to assemble, was available on demand the moment the season ended (Table 1).

Students reserved 78% of the stock in the first six hours and 94% within two days, with 128 orders in the first six hours (Figure 4). 363 students signed up to shop and 159 could order before stock ran out: the limit was supply, not interest, indicating that the pilot needs to grow.

Adding what the season delivered gives about $23,307 of value before a single item was sold: $14,401 saved by 159 students, $91 each, against buying new; $8,770 of staff time not spent hand-logging; and $136 in landfill fees avoided [15]. That is 4.7 times the annual list price of ReDorm Gold for a campus this size [17] (Table 2).

The program kept 1.3 tons out of the bins: everything handed out, plus what is stored for next season. That material carries 6.4 metric tons CO2e of embodied carbon kept in use, and an estimated 4.3 metric tons CO2e of new production avoided [16].

Generated with ReDorm

This is UC San Diego's real pilot data, instantly generated with ReDorm.

When the season ended there was no spreadsheet to build: the report was already there, ready to share as a live link anyone can open or as a PDF for anyone who wants a file.

1.3 tonskept out of the bins

6.4 t CO2eembodied carbon kept in use

4.3 t CO2enew production avoided

app.redorm.co/r/ucsd-sustainable-move-out

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Impact report (PDF): PDF, 10 pages, 450 KB. Read it here

“Reuse is the hardest metric to capture and report out on. With ReDorm you get a tracking tool that gives me one less report, one less Excel, that I ever have to do. That is awesome. When you work in sustainability, it's all about communicating, and by instantly having that data, it makes it easier to move on to the next program, which probably already started. I really like that ReDorm helped close out the pilot super quick.”Elizabeth Lin, Zero Waste Manager, UC San Diego

AlsoEDCO's Spring 2026 Move-Out ReportMove-out tonnage by residential area and material stream, with three-year trends, from UC San Diego's waste hauler. PDF, 8 pages, 1.8 MB

This was a pilot, and it ran like one: three of UC San Diego's eight colleges, a handful of staff and students, a borrowed pickup truck and one storage room. What it left behind is the case for the next season. Because every item collected and handed out ran through ReDorm, the team does not have to reconstruct the year to pitch the next one: diversion by weight, embodied carbon, student savings and student demand already sit in one report, ready to put in front of the colleges that sat this year out. Only 3 of UC San Diego's 8 colleges took part, and 204 students who signed up never got the chance to order. The plan is five colleges next year and all eight after that. At this year's pace, all eight would be more than two and a half times this season, assuming each college gives as much as this year's three.