Jin Jung and Doron Hu on Wednesday morning hauled a carload of furniture and other home goods to a donation station set up near their West Campus apartments.

The couple, both 23, recently graduated from the University of Texas with accounting degrees and are moving to Dallas to start new jobs. In years past, they would dump their things outside their apartments whenever they moved out, which they admitted was sometimes easier.

"It feels nicer not to waste," Jung said. "It's much cleaner out here."

This summer, Austin Resource Recovery set up donation stations in West Campus the last two weekends in July as a way to divert students' gently used items and unopened foods toward reuse organizations across Austin.

The program, called MoveOutATX, aims to keep trash out of the city's landfills and keep the streets around UT clean as thousands of students move out of West Campus apartments before the start of the new school year.

Maddie Morgan, a UT graduate who started as an Austin Resource Recovery intern, created the pilot program last year after noticing things like furniture, appliances, unopened food and clothes ending up in streets and alleys around West Campus on move-out days. The items created a safety hazard and an inconvenience for nearby businesses, which often had to throw out the trash at their expense.

"I think anybody who has driven through West Campus at the end of July knows about this problem," said Susanne Harm, an Austin Resource Recovery spokeswoman. "This is the first year we have come up with a really great solution."



Last year's pilot started with three donation stations in West Campus, which picked up about 62 tons of material from students. That's 23 school buses filled floor to ceiling with items that did not end up in the landfill, according to Austin Resource Recovery. It estimated the economic value from those items being resold and reused at $150,000.

This year, Harm said it expects to collect triple that amount with three times as many stations set up. The items will be distributed among eight reuse organizations, including Goodwill Central Texas, Salvation Army Family Stores, Central Texas Food Bank, Street Youth Ministry, Arms of Hope, Austin Creative Reuse, JOSCO Products and JunkLuggers.

"People are dropping off computers, flat-screen TVs, appliances," Harm said. "We get a lot of unopened food, soup, canned goods. Now that we are here, it’s being donated to folks that can really use it."

On Wednesday, the last day to donate, Sindhuja Gade, 21, brought a stack of MCAT study books to the donation station behind the Cain and Abel's restaurant at 24th and Rio Grande streets.

Gade took her MCAT in January and said she had planned to sell the books, but most students want new ones. She and her roommate had been dropping off items at the donation station all morning.

"It's nice to know they'll go to good use," Gade said. "Otherwise, we'd just dump them."

Students who donated items were given stickers that read "I am a West Campus hero" and "I heart reuse" to use in exchange for discounts and other promotional offers at nearby businesses.

Austin Resource Recovery, a division of the city that aims to reduce trash sent to landfills by 90% by 2040, decided to launch the program in West Campus because it's an extremely dense neighborhood, with more than 11,000 apartment units, some with two to three students. That translates to tons of trash on move-out days.

Next year, the department plans to expand the program's reach to Riverside Drive and Pleasant Valley Road, where many other students live. Harm said the goal is to create a model that can be implemented at other Texas universities, so more trash can be repurposed.

"We want to make the landfills in and around Austin last as long as possible and to do that you need to stop putting things in there that don’t belong in the first place," Harm said. "What a huge dent we could make."