Making Move-Outs Better for the Environment and Society

While trying to develop our own Sustainable Move-out program for Occidental, my team and I looked at other schools for inspiration on how to successfully implement the program. While we were unable to find many concrete logistical information about these programs, the other university programs did show us that such programs can have extremely beneficial results on campus and within the community. Suffolk University developed its, Dump and Run Program, and 2.5 tons of goods avoided landfills and ended up in the hands of 64 needy individuals. Many other universities have similar programs and have teamed up with a variety of non-profits to make sure that clothes, furniture, and food are donated properly at the end of the semester. We are quite excited that the logistical details of our project our beginning to take form. First, we met with Juls, the head of res-life to determine if we could involve Res-Life in the project. With her approval of our current plan, we are well on our way to creating Oxy’s first program of this kind. We are still coordinating details with campus safety, and determining our donation partners, but these matters should be fairly easy to figure out. The biggest obstacle for our group is finding enough volunteers to man all of the dorms at the end of the semester when many students have already left, or are working on moving themselves out of the dorms. We plan on heavily promoting this opportunity through flyers, oxy digest posts, contacting the UEP list serve, and recruiting students at Earth day. Hopefully, we will be able to get enough volunteers to successfully implement Sustainable Move-out at the end of this semester.