Spring move-out season leaves campus littered with discarded mirrors, lamps and mattress toppers — and, this year, at least one surfboard? 

In Spring 2026, the University launched a pilot donation program across residence halls at USC Village, collecting household goods from students during move-out. Gina Whisenant, a sustainability manager with USC Facilities Planning and Management, said she found the surfboard donation hysterical when staff found it among donated nonperishable foods. 

Now, from Aug. 19 to 21 during move-in, USC Surplus Sales will operate three pop-ups, reselling dorm-essential items. A University spokesperson wrote that goods will be priced from $1 to $35. 

“That’s something that people have been wanting for a long time,” Whisenant said. “It’s very helpful to the University because we’re able to collect items that would normally be thrown away or discarded and put them back into what we call a circular system, because these items are definitely lightly used, they’re valuable. Sustainability is all about prolonging the life of what it is that you’re using.”

Surplus Sales went on hiatus in March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It returned for the 2025-26 school year. Instagram posts from the department pre-pandemic do not reference any move-out item collection or move-in sales.

The University as a whole has a goal to reach 90% waste diversion by 2028 as part of its Assignment: Earth framework. Whisenant stated that the school’s fiscal year 2026 waste diversion rate was 60%.

The move-out donation collection and the pop-ups through Surplus Sales are estimated to divert about four tons of material from local landfills, according to Calvin Holmes, director of mailing and material management services. 

In response to questions from the Daily Trojan, Holmes wrote that University employees put around 250 labor hours into preparing donated items for move-in. That included weighing, refurbishing, sorting and pricing donated items, according to Holmes.

Similar programs exist at colleges across the United States, including the University of New Hampshire, UC Berkeley and Eckerd College in Florida. In 2024, EcoDorm, a USC student-led initiative, ran a reclaim-and-resale program. 

Evan Bollier, sustainability director at Eckerd, has run the move-in sale program since the 2013-14 academic year at the college, which houses just under 2,000 students. Bollier said the program has employed up to 40 volunteers. A paper Bollier co-published showed it has employed up to six summer interns and produced up to $20,000 in sales in a single year.

He said that, since the pandemic, students have gotten more on board with the reuse program. 

“Parents have always been down for a good deal,” Bollier said. “In the last few years, probably since COVID, I’ve seen more students being like, ‘Yeah, I’m really into thrifting,’ which has been a change.”

Bollier said the most profitable items have been microwaves and mini fridges. He said one of the biggest challenges to the program is making it convenient enough for students to take the time to donate items. 

“To no one’s shock: Students are lazy, just like humanity in general,” Bollier said. “We’ve just found that students will go to leave their things in the easiest possible location that they can.”

Bollier said that can even mean a trash can nearby the donation area. 

To counteract this, Bollier said, he sets up over 70 donation areas for the college’s 12 dormitories. A study by a USC graduate psychology class on behalf of the University reached similar findings about the importance of convenience.

In 2025, students enrolled in “Applied Psychology Treatise” surveyed 45 students and conducted 15 interviews with students and staff. They found that although 67% of students were motivated to embrace sustainability by “environmental concerns,” the same amount felt “convenience” was important in their decision whether to act sustainably. 

“Especially during the move-in process, for some students, moving from their high school to a new area, their parents really want to not spoil them, but want to provide a relatively easy life for them,” said David Ai, one of the students involved in the 2025 research. “Also, because the Village got a Target, it is so easy to just go there and buy stuff. And Target, they never run out of supplies.”

Meanwhile on the move-out side, Ai, now a graduate student studying business administration, said students are squeezed between finals and prescheduled flights, leaving them without time to find proper donation avenues.

Among the recommendations of that study: more strategic and specific signage, reinforcing a culture of sustainability and early communication. Ai said his classmates presented their research in May 2025 but did not know to what extent it was received or implemented due to the many stakeholders in the move-out process.

The complete 2026 operation involved work from USC Housing, USC Sustainability, FPM and USC Surplus Sales itself.

USC said that, during the Spring 2026 move-out, other partners were also involved in waste diversion: 26 tons of goods went to Goodwill, 10 tons of textiles went to a Los Angeles charity and just over a thousand food items were collected by a local food bank.

Whisenant said Goodwill returned to the move-out process after prior intermittent involvement. The 2026 program was a pilot run, Whisenant said, limited to USC Village housing due to those buildings’ larger lobbies. She said the program will examine whether it can expand and grow in future years, but she would like to see more items taken by Surplus Sales and kept within the USC community. 

“If Surplus got four tons, is it possible for Surplus to get more of that [total]?” Whisenant said. “Either way, it’s being donated, but I would like to see it go back to students in the community at a lower [price point] and have it stay in a circular environment.”

Whisenant said that, in the big picture, sustainability also extends to student purchases and reducing purchases prior to move-in.

“It would be nice if people were able to be aware,” Whisenant said. “I have a very passionate zero-waste auditor that always says, ‘People think it goes away. Well, away is a place, right?’ Nothing just goes away. It goes somewhere, and so we can reuse, donate, all of those things. The best thing to do ever, though, is to not create it at all.”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated USC’s waste diversion rate was 64%. The article was updated Aug. 20 at 2 p.m. to reflect that the waste diversion rate for fiscal year 2026 was 60%. The Daily Trojan regrets this error.