News
Six Tonnes of Student 'Stuff' Rescued from Landfill!
For the second year running Kingston University's Sustainability Team, Halls Managers and KUSCO ran the end of term donations scheme on all five University halls of residence sites. The 2000 vacating students were asked to donate their unwanted belongings to charity to prevent thousands of perfectly good items from going to landfill.
This year the turn out was staggering, with mountains of clothes, shoes, kitchen ware, bedding, toys, books, electrical equipment, and even a scooter! Cancer Research were happy to take 5 van loads of the donated items to the local Cancer Research stores to be resold and reused.
Other charities which benefited from the end of term donations scheme included a London homeless charity took ten bags of food that would have otherwise been binned and the animals at Battersea Dogs Home were given the students unwanted duvets.
To find out more about how you can recycle every day, visit the recycling pages.
Details of the halls donation scheme
Introduction
Kingston University is situated on four separate campuses: Knights Park, Kingston Hill, Penrhyn Road, Roehampton Vale. In addition, St. George' Hospital in Tooting provides many of the Faculty of Health and Social Care's courses. It is a large University with 1,521 staff and 15,586 students and expected a growth of 1,700 FTE students by 2005/06. There are 5 halls, which provide accommodation to Percentage of first years students who require lodging . Each of the halls are divided into flats, 5-10 students (number various depending on the layout of the hall) sharing one flat with common ketch and bathroom.
Each flat is cleaned by the students, who live there, and all rubbish is put into a central rubbish bin by students on a rotational basis.
There are recycling bins available in Seething Wells, Middle Mill and Clayhill (table 1). However, due to refurbishing work at Kingston Hill Hall and lack of apace at Kingston Bridge House, there are no recycling facility available at present. Middle Mill will have bottle and can banks available from September, 2005.
As the term normally finishes at the end of June, students are required to vacate halls by noon on 25th June. Hall managers are very concerned about the large amount of waste and reusable items that students generate and leave behind at that time of the year. They reported that a large proportion of the reusable items are ending up in the waste bins. Each year, valuable items that are left in students' rooms are collected and saved for two weeks as lost and found in hall receptions and are then sent to local charities if they are not claimed by students. This involved much extra work for hall management teams and cleaners.
Objective:
In 2005 the Steering Group for Sustainability (SGS) at Kingston University initiated an End of Year Donation Scheme. This activity aimed to identify and collect reusable items and distribute them to local charities. The objectives of the scheme are to:
- Reduce landfilled waste
- Support University and local council reuse schemes
- Raise awareness of sustainable development among students and Hall staff
- Reduce the cost of waste disposal
- Reduce the workload of Halls staff (e.g. cleaners)
Results
Items were sorted into different types into approximately 40 per pile/box
| Donation received | No. of items (approximately) |
| Clothing | 2000 |
| Shoes | 250 pair |
| Bedding (including duvets, duvet covers, sheets etc.) | 300 |
| Kitchen (including pots, glasses, plates etc) | 2500 |
| Suitcases and bags | 100 |
| Electronic equipment (including computer monitors; printers; HiFi; kitchen appliances etc) | 30 |
| Food | 30 |
| Furniture (side tables, cabinet etc) | 15 |
| Toys (including Skiboard; soft toys, Monopoly etc) | 40 |
| Books and stationary | 100 |
| Others (including clothes hangers, jewellery, watches; air beds etc) | 300 |
| Total in number | 5665 |
| Total in volume (black bags) | 250 |
The volume of the donation was enough for at least 5 skips; therefore this activity has saved 5 skips of waste going to landfill. The condition of most of the items were very good.
The following pictures show the condition of the donated items and the view of the storage room:
What Can You Do?
Find out about the Sustainability Hub and the University's Environmental Policy
