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Let's be friendsOne student's waste is another's gold
Unis and students throw away loads of stuff at the end of each year. Edinburgh P&P came up with a clever scheme to save it from the bins and give it to new students through their Big Freshers Free Shop. Find out how you could do the same!
At this year’s Edinburgh Fresher’s Fair, over five tonnes of ‘waste’ was diverted from landfill through a clever student-led Going Greener project. From jeans to plates, books, hangers, Mexican hats and everything else in between, one student’s waste became another’s gold at The Big Freshers Free Shop - an exciting finale to Freshers Week.
Freshers flock to Edinburgh’s Free Shop
Hours before the doors opened, the queue was snaking all the way out of Potterow and spilling into Bristo Square. In these cash-strapped times, this innovative Zero Waste project saved students’ cash, but more importantly, led to the recycling of items that are bought and thrown away each year by successive student cohorts.
Members of Edinburgh University’s People & Planet group were hoping to raise awareness of the masses of re-usable items that end up in landfill each year when students move out of their university accommodation. Tired of seeing fluffy duvets, working televisions, sturdy clothes horses and shiny cables lying forlorn in the bin every May/June, the P&P group collected the unwanted items from students in Pollock Halls and University flats, stored them over the summer and gave them out to the students for free at the start of term.
With the help of a small grant from Waste Action Edinburgh, the project succeeded in reducing the university’s end of term skips to landfill from 14 down to 6. Anything that was left over by students was donated to charity. Fresh Start, an Edinburgh based charity which makes up ‘starter-packs’ for the homeless, benefited from a mountain of duvets and pillows and the £284.81 collected as donations on the door.
After an extremely successful first run of the project, accommodation services staff at the university have linked up with the People & Planet group and their newly established Transition Steering group with a view to making this a yearly event and something that will, in time, change student and staff attitudes towards waste and consumption.
Other groups, such as UEA have managed to get their universities to do it themselves arguing that it will save them money on landfill tax and increase their rating in the Green League.
Check out our Going Greener campaign for loads more ideas on achieving a transition to Zero-Waste
