Dear Administrators and Students of Columbia University,

We must change the way dorm move-out is organized.

The yearly move-out process is rushed and disorganized, and students do not receive adequate support from the University to vacate their dorms in a sustainable way. As a result, the process is extremely damaging to the environment.

The amount of clothes, school/dorm supplies, electronics, salvageable food, and furniture headed to landfills in each residential hall is disturbing. We have attached a few photos and videos that highlight the sheer enormity of the wastefulness caused by move-out each year.

It is appalling that an institution that claims to care about climate change and sustainability allows such irresponsible acts of waste to occur en masse. Dorm move-out can be improved with intentional programming and leadership from the administration, and we believe that the University is responsible for making move-out a less harmful process for students, staff, and the environment.

In response to these issues, we present three main points:

More Time for Move-Out:
The University needs to give students more time during move-out to organize, donate, and store their belongings in a sustainable way so that students will not default to throwing things out due to the stress of being required to vacate so quickly post-finals/after graduation.
Students should be allowed to stay in their housing for at least 48 hours once the Spring finals period ends. The current policy of only giving students 24 hours after their last final is unrealistic, causes stress, and forces students to engage in wasteful behavior during the move-out process.

Sustainability Education and Resources for Recycling:
The University must first educate students on the importance of reusing and recycling food, clothes, school/dorm supplies, and electronics. Some Columbia students may not have learned about sustainability before coming to Columbia, so it is the University’s responsibility to help teach students about sustainable living practices and decrease the University's environmental impact.
The University must then make the process of reusing and recycling accessible by providing on-campus resources such as food, clothing, and appliance drives weeks before move-out and by making students aware of off-campus donation centers and food banks. There is also room for the University to implement new systems to incentivize students to work on minimizing their waste.
For example, a campus-wide version of Facebook MarketPlace or Buy Nothing could easily be put in place, and could help provide students an efficient way to donate, resell and purchase what they items at the end of the academic year.

Investing in Storage Space:
The University needs to provide free storage space on or near campus to encourage students to store and reuse their items from year to year, rather than throwing them out. The financial and logistical pressures that come with move-out often force students to throw away many of their possessions. However, if Columbia were to provide storage to students, people would likely be able to keep a larger portion of their belongings which would help reduce waste.
Columbia is one of the largest landowners in New York City, and it seems feasible that a dorm or an academic building could be converted into a no-cost storage facility during the summer months.

In conclusion, Columbia has to create a better plan to minimize the amount of waste generated by move-out each year. College life should not be this wasteful.

We also want to call attention to the fact that the work of creating a University-wide sustainable move-out plan should not fall primarily to student-run clubs like EcoReps that receive no University funding, but rather should be the responsibility of the University, and should be facilitated by departments such as Columbia Housing, Undergraduate Student Life and Sustainable Columbia. The magnitude of the damage being caused each year during Spring move-out is outside the scope of what student groups can be expected to handle without a systemic change on the part of the University.

In addition, each year Columbia University asks the Facilities team to almost single-handedly bear the brunt of removing and cleaning up the waste and discarded items abandoned in dorms at the end of move-out. This is an unfair burden that both the students and the administrators of the University actively place on our Facility workers. We hope that a University-wide commitment to minimizing waste will lessen the burden on the facilities team.

We are grateful for our facility workers and our student groups who actively challenge Columbia’s wastefulness, and hope the University will better respect and honor their time and energy going forward.

Columbia needs to take sustainability seriously. Minimizing waste, recycling and reusing need to be at the core of how Columbia approaches move-out each year. Many other colleges have taken initiatives to make their schools more sustainable institutions, and Columbia must follow suit.

Columbia cannot claim to teach the “leaders of tomorrow”, while simultaneously enabling and necessitating wasteful, and environmentally destructive behavior amongst their students.

Best,
Cat and Phoebe

Signed By:
Kassandra Jutis & Sydney Wells, EcoReps Co-Presidents
Savannah Jones, Energy & Environment Center Co-director of the Columbia Policy Institute
SDG Student Hub
Sunrise Columbia
Jacqueline M. Klopp, Director/Research Scholar at Center for Sustainable Urban Development , Columbia Climate School