How to Start a Campus Move-Out Reuse Program

There is surprisingly little written on how to actually start a campus move-out reuse program. Most of what exists online is either a campus's own program page — bin locations, dates, what they accept — or a stats roundup from a junk-removal company. The closest thing to a real operator's manual, the Post-Landfill Action Network's Move-Out Program Manual, is a valuable resource but lives as a gated PDF. This guide is the version we wish existed when we started: an honest, specific walkthrough of what it takes.

What a move-out reuse program actually is

At its simplest, a move-out reuse program intercepts the usable dorm items students leave behind at the end of the year — furniture, small appliances, bedding, unopened food — before they hit the dumpster. Programs split into two models: donation-only (collected items go straight to a nonprofit partner like Goodwill) and collect-and-resell (items are stored over the summer and sold back to incoming students at move-in, usually at 60–80% off retail). See our comparison of the two models if you're deciding between them — this guide covers the logistics either one requires.

The realistic timeline

Most first-year pilots need three to four months of lead time before move-out. Roughly: a month to get sign-off from housing, facilities, and sustainability offices and to identify a collection site; a month to line up storage and recruit or hire student staff; and a month of pre-move-out logistics — ordering bins or boxes, printing signage, and building the actual day-by-day schedule. We've laid out the complete month-by-month version of this as a standalone checklist, and a guided version in our Program Planner.

Staffing it

Nearly every campus program we've studied — UNH's Trash 2 Treasure, Stanford's Give & Go, U-M's move-out collection — runs primarily on student staff and volunteers, not full-time employees. UW–Madison's 2025 season ran on 207 volunteers, over 90% of them students. Budget for a small paid core (2–4 student leads who own scheduling and quality control) supported by volunteer shifts during the highest-volume days. RA and hall staff involvement matters less for labor than for one specific thing: they are the fastest way to get bin locations and donation guidelines in front of every resident.

Where to store it over the summer

This is the most commonly underestimated part of the whole program. Options, roughly in order of what campuses actually use: an unused residence hall room or basement (free, but usually not climate controlled and limited in square footage); a facilities or auxiliary services warehouse bay, if your campus has one with spare capacity; or a rented storage unit or pod, which costs money but is predictable to budget and easy to add capacity to in year two. Whatever you choose, plan for pest control and moisture — textiles and mattresses are the items most likely to be ruined by a damp storage space, and they're also the highest-volume category most programs collect.

Liability and insurance

Talk to your institution's risk management or general counsel's office before you launch. Most donation drives operate under a school's existing general liability coverage with no special waiver required, but this varies by institution, and any formal partnership with an outside nonprofit or hauler should go through procurement review. This is not legal advice — it's the single step campuses most often skip and then have to backfill after the fact, so raise it early rather than after your first pickup.

What it costs, and what it avoids

The direct cost side is mostly labor and storage — see our full cost and ROI breakdown for real numbers. The avoided-cost side is often bigger than campuses expect: the average landfill tipping fee was $62.28 per ton in 2024, and move-out is a concentrated spike in a campus's waste-hauling volume for the year — diverting even a few tons out of the dumpster stream shows up directly in a facilities budget.

Picking a model that fits your campus

If your sustainability office has capacity but no revenue mandate, a donation-only partnership (Goodwill's Give & Go program is the most common) is the fastest thing to stand up — see how it compares to a resale model. If your housing or auxiliary services office wants the program to pay for itself and return value to students at move-in, a collect-and-resell model takes more logistics but is what schools like Stanford, Boston University, and UC San Diego actually run. Both models earn credit under AASHE STARS OP 11.1.

Frequently asked questions