Roughly 800 University of Guelph students live on Chancellor’s Way and every year many of them move out they leave behind a mountain of usable goods.
From food and clothing to furniture and kitchen appliances, it gets piled up at the side of the street and dumpsters are brought in to take the mess away.
Kalev Jaason got tired of seeing so much good stuff go to waste and decided that this year he was going to do something about it.
Jaason, with the help of a group of volunteers and with assistance from the U o G’s sustainability office started Operation Separation. It’s 10 days of collecting and protecting the items being thrown out and hopefully getting it to various agencies in the city that can distribute it to those in need.
They’ve even collected 100 textbooks so far.
“It’s a little overwhelming,” admits Jaason of the amount of items. “I’m a little surprised by how much there is.”
Last year Jaason produced a documentary film on the amount of waste on Chancellor's Way called Diverted: A Treasure Trove of Trash.
On Friday Jaason delivered a load of 44 kilograms of perfectly good food items to the Guelph Food Bank.
There are bins full of clothes and storage pods starting to get filled to the brim with larger items.
The food and clothes are relatively easy to distribute to agencies. Furniture and larger items are more difficult as some charities don’t have room to take large items or don’t have transportation to come collect it.
“We know there’s organizations that could use it. The challenge is getting it to these people.”
The U of G has a program called Move Out Madness that sees them collect unwanted items on from campus residences that they store until the next school year for others to use, but they don’t have the capacity to handle the deluge that occurs on Chancellor’s Way.
This initial Operation Separation is a pilot project, Jaason said, and hopes that in the future an organization with more experience with handling the logistics of the event will become involved.
“It’s all about reusing and recycling so that it doesn’t end up in the landfill,” he said.
He expects the next two weekends to see even more items, as students move out.
Many are foreign or out-of-province students who don’t have the desire or means to take their things with them.
Jaason said any organization looking for items, or anyone who can offer some volunteer time to help, can contact him at [email protected].
