AASHE STARS Credit for Campus Reuse Programs (OP 11.1)

If your campus reports to AASHE's Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a move-out reuse program is one of the more straightforward credits available to you — and one of the ones sustainability offices most often leave on the table because nobody connects the dots between "we ran a donation drive" and "that counts toward a specific, named indicator."

The credit: OP 11.1, Surplus and Reuse Programs

Under STARS 3.0, AASHE's public Materials Management help center defines indicator OP 11.1 to cover exactly this model. The criteria language names "reuse programs through which employees and/or students can donate personal items for redistribution... free/thrift shop, pop-up exchange, or surplus program that redistributes office supplies, clothing, kitchen items, books, and/or electronics" as qualifying activity. A campus move-out-to-move-in program is a textbook match for this description.

If your institution still reports under STARS 2.x, the equivalent credit is OP-18, Waste Minimization and Diversion (OP-19 in some older versions) — several public STARS reports, including UMass Amherst's and the University of Virginia's "Hoos Reuse" program, document move-out reuse activity under this indicator.

What it takes to document it

STARS submissions generally want three things: a description of the program, the weight or volume of material diverted, and a brief note on methodology — how that figure was calculated. This is where most programs run into friction, because a season run on clipboards and end-of-summer guesses produces a number nobody can defend under review. A program that scans or logs each item at intake — by category and weight, as it's collected rather than reconstructed afterward — produces exactly the evidence STARS wants, as a natural byproduct of running the program day to day.

For a concrete example: EcoDorm's 2024 pilot at USC (the program that became ReDorm) submitted a 2024 impact report reviewed by a TRUE Zero Waste Certified Advisor, and mapped its own results directly against six separate STARS 3.0 indicators — OP 11.1, OP 11.3 (Electronic Waste Management), OP 12.1 (Waste per Person), OP 12.3 (% Diverted from Disposal), and two AC 4 applied-learning credits for student involvement in logistics and data collection. One well-documented program supported all six.

Beyond OP 11.1: what else the same data supports

• OP 11.3, Electronic Waste Management — if your program collects small appliances or electronics (microwaves, fans, lamps) and reuses or responsibly recycles them.
• OP 12.1, Waste per Person and OP 12.3, % Diverted from Disposal — your program's diverted weight feeds directly into these campus-wide waste metrics, provided you can report it separately from routine recycling.
• AC 4, Applied Learning — if students run the logistics, data collection, or emissions calculations, that participation itself can support an academic-credit indicator.

Why this is worth doing even if you don't report to STARS

STARS reporting is optional, but the underlying discipline — logging what actually came in, by category and weight, instead of estimating it at the end of the season — is the same discipline that makes a program defensible in front of a budget committee. See our cost and ROI guide for how that same data makes the financial case.

Frequently asked questions