Jumbo Drop recycling program canceled this year

    Students will have to look elsewhere for second-hand mirrors and microwaves. Jumbo Drop, the annual sale that redistributes used student items, will not be held this year due to cost issues.
    Items for Jumbo Drop are collected in May and resold in September in an effort to reduce the waste created by move-outs. Funds raised are donated to charity, but facility department recycling coordinator Dawn Quirk, who is in charge of the program, said that inefficiencies have prevented the operation from giving money to charity in the past five years.
    Jumbo Drop — which began as a student-run initiative six years ago — receives $5,000 from the Facilities department every year, but the funding is not enough to pay student employees, store items over the summer and operate the sale in the fall.
    Items collected by Jumbo Drop employees last year will be donated to a charity rather than resold to Tufts students, and workers will continue to collect goods in the future. The hope, Quirk said, is that a bigger organization will be able to turn a profit from the donated items.
    Quirk said that she regretted the cancellation of the sale but emphasized that the sale's main objective — waste reduction — may be better facilitated through other means.
    "As a facilities and Tufts Recycles! operation, our main goal is to keep items out of the trash. Absent the many hours of organizing usually dedicated to running the sale, I was able to ramp up other efforts," she said.
    Student workers and volunteers helped to recycle six cubic yards of cardboard, 96 bags of compost, 350 pounds of food and 25 bags of glass, metal and plastic in just one day of freshman orientation, according to Quirk.
    Although she said the cancellation of the sale may be a blow to veteran student shoppers, Quirk did not feel they would be too inconvenienced thanks to other venues that are available for reselling used items, including popular sites like Craigslist.com and TuftsLife.com.
    Quirk added that most students who buy Jumbo Drop items live off-campus and seek furniture. With its "yard sale" format, she said, Jumbo Drop never received the best furniture anyway.
    The quality of items left behind or donated by students also created inefficiencies for the Jumbo Drop team.
    Senior Audra Buckley, a Jumbo Drop student worker, said that student workers spend a lot of time testing donated electronics. "A lot of the electronics end up not working and have to be thrown away," she said in an e-mail. "So in the end, much time is wasted."
    Buckley further explained that many students take items from Jumbo Drop without paying.
    Storing the Jumbo Drop items until the sale in the fall also proved problematic. Junior Kelsey Schur, another Jumbo Drop worker, described the physical condition of the warehouse as a major roadblock to the sale's success.
    "The warehouse that we keep things in leaks badly, there is serious flooding and the conditions became so incredibly hot and moldy that it is hard to work," Schur said. She added that some goods were damaged or destroyed through transport and flooding, which decreased the total quality of the sale.
    "[Jumbo Drop] is a noble effort, but people could do that themselves from year to year," Schur said. "They could make more of an effort to save things and find ways to reuse this stuff without us helping them."
    Quirk said that in the time she would have dedicated to Jumbo drop, she was able to review recycling guidelines with the custodial staff earlier this year. "This means that the cardboard generated from the move-in process will be recycled more diligently because I already had face time to instruct every person on the cleaning crew," she said.