College Move-Out Waste Statistics: A Sourced Reference

Nearly every article about college move-out waste repeats the same handful of numbers, often without a source. We went looking for the primary data behind them. Here is what actually holds up, what doesn't, and where each figure comes from.

The number everyone cites, and why we're cautious about it

The most repeated statistic in this category is that college students generate 640 lbs of waste per year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 lbs of paper. It traces back to the nonprofit Dump & Run, and appears — always with the same attribution, never a methodology or date — across dozens of sustainability sites. We could not locate Dump & Run's original study, its sample size, or its publication date. We're citing it here as attributed folklore, not as a verified fact, and we'd encourage anyone else citing it to do the same until a primary source surfaces.

What the US EPA actually measures

The federal government's own data is more conservative but far better documented. The EPA's most recent complete Facts and Figures dataset (2018) puts national furniture-and-furnishings waste at 12.1 million tons a year, of which 80.1% was landfilled and less than 0.5% was recycled. Dorm move-out is a concentrated slice of that same waste stream — the same category of goods, discarded in a two-week window instead of spread across the year.

What individual campuses actually report

Rather than a single national figure, the strongest evidence in this space is a collection of individually measured campus programs:

• UNH Trash 2 Treasure: monthly campus waste rises from roughly 25 tons to 105 tons during move-out — a 4.2x spike — and the program has diverted 174+ tons since founding, saving students over $500,000 at move-in. It is also the subject of the only peer-reviewed academic case study we found on a campus move-out program (Bollier & Ormsby, 2020).
• Stanford Give & Go: 612+ tons diverted since 2013, run across 7,000+ departing students in one week each spring.
• Boston University: 113 tons diverted in May 2024 alone; over 2 million lbs across 16 years of the program.
• University of Michigan: a record 16.5 tons collected in one recent season, serving 511 households and 634 children through nonprofit partners.
• UW–Madison Sustainable Move-Out: 196,469 lbs kept out of landfill in 2026 and 174,994 lbs in 2025, run by 207 volunteers, over 90% of them students. University Housing states on the same page that "over 8,000 students move out of the University Residence Halls" each year, which makes this one of the few campus programs publishing both a diverted weight and the population it was diverted from.
• Villanova: roughly 130 tons of items left behind in 2025 — described by their facilities office as "a football field, one foot deep."

The economics: what it costs, and what's at stake

The National Retail Federation put 2024 back-to-college spending at $86.6 billion, of which $12.2 billion went to dorm and apartment furnishings — an average of $192.40 per student. That's the market a resale program sells back into. On the disposal side, the average landfill tipping fee was $62.28 per ton in 2024 (Environmental Research & Education Foundation) — the number that shows up directly in a facilities budget when a program diverts material out of the dumpster stream.

A correction: the "230 tons every May" figure

A statistic that has propagated into several secondary articles claims U.S. colleges generate "230+ tons of move-out waste each May" nationally. That number does not hold up as a national total — it appears to be a single-campus figure (in the range several individual schools, including Tufts, have reported for their own annual waste) that got misattributed as a national aggregate along the way. We are not repeating it here, and would encourage anyone citing it to trace it back to its actual source campus rather than treat it as a U.S.-wide number.

How much a program collects, per student in housing

The most useful number for a campus deciding whether to start a program is not total waste — it is how much a running program actually takes in per student living in housing. Two universities publish both halves of that fraction, which is what makes it calculable rather than guessed:

• UW–Madison: 196,469 lbs (2026) and 174,994 lbs (2025) across the "over 8,000" students its Housing office says move out of the residence halls each year — 24.6 and 21.9 lbs per resident.
• Boston University: 225,000 lbs diverted in a year by Goodwill, Not Landfill, against roughly 16,000 students in BU residences — 14.1 lbs per resident.

We use 20 lbs per resident as the collectable figure in our own tools — below UW–Madison, whose comprehensive program runs on 207 volunteers and 21+ partners, and above BU's donation-only drive. Our business plan calculator and the student email generator both decompose it the same way: 40 lbs of move-out waste per resident, about half of it in reusable condition. The product is the part that carries the sourcing; treat the split as our working assumption. These are the most accurate per-resident figures we have, and we update them as campuses publish new results.

How ReDorm estimates its own market-sizing figures

Where you'll see us cite a rounder, larger figure — for example, on our what is dorm reuse page — that number is our own modeled estimate, built from the EPA and NRF data above plus diversion rates observed across ReDorm partner campuses, not a census. We say so explicitly wherever we use it, for the same reason we're flagging the 640-lb figure above: an unattributed number is not evidence, even when everyone repeats it.

Frequently asked questions