Every May across the USA, students exit their dorms and apartments and return to their ancestral parental homes.
They leave behind a ton of stuff.
My daughter moved out of her college dorm room for the last time in May. As we were hauling her stuff down to the car, she pointed out the “grab anything you want” pile.
One student had thrown out their Christmas coffee beans. The package was almost full.
Another left a perfectly good Apple USB-C charger.
I grabbed the beans because even though they were not fresh, they would supplement my coffee mixture for a good number of mornings. And I knew I could use the charger somewhere.
We also bolstered our snack stash for the journey home.
That was just the tip of the iceberg.
We didn’t need a couch, and none of the clothing fit my style.
Multiply this by 5,300* and you can imagine the number of truckloads going to landfills – tons and tons of valuable stuff just wasted.
An environmentally-aware entrepreneur could prevent that waste by creating organizations to intercept discarded goods before they enter landfills.
* That is the approximate number of colleges and universities across the USA.