One of my favorite movies growing up was The Brave Little Toaster. There’s a particularly memorable scene in which the Brave Little Toaster and his appliance friends, while searching for the owner who abandoned them, are taken to the back room of a pawn shop. Once there they are harassed (in operatic, minor-key musical style per Disney) by a menagerie of used and out-of-date appliances and furniture. The whole encounter is quite scary to a 10 year old and you get the impression that used items go mad when left to sit in a storage room, ignored by the world once their “useful” life is over.

I was reminded of this scene when putting together the new AASHE member’s resource, Campus Surplus Property Recycling Programs. Too often when we perceive something has outlived its usefulness we simply throw it away. Sometimes this means a college student will end up with a good used couch, but more often this means a landfill somewhere will get another item to add to its already immense collection.  Even worse, simply throwing away used items can also mean dumping waste in poorer countries and polluting the world's populations and ecosystems with high concentrations of toxic metals and waste.

Fortunately many colleges and universities realize that throwing away used items is wasteful, both environmentally and economically. To this end, surplus departments collect and reuse or sale older equipment that is being replaced. AASHE’s Campus Surplus Recycling resource is a compiled list of college and university surplus operations. We’ve highlighted the ones that place a special emphasis on the recycling and reusing aspect of the surplus process. Some good examples of surplus programs that take a proactive, recycling-focused approach are the University of Guelph’s Stuff Swap and the University of Texas at Austin’s Trash to Treasure project, both of which collect unwanted student items from move-out days in addition to more traditional surplus operations.

We hope this new resource will help campuses expand their thinking about what both “recycle” and “surplus” can mean. The importance of making sure used items don't end their years of service by taking up space in a landfill or polluting an ecosystem shouldn't be overlooked. While it may make for an enjoyable cartoon, I don’t think any of us relish the thought of our 200 pound file cabinet coming after us in real life. Yet that’s what essentially happens when we allow used items to be needlessly thrown away; they come back to haunt us as unnecessary pollution which is something that none of us can enjoy.

• Justin Mullikin
    AASHE Intern