Anyone who has been in a college dorm on the final day of the school year knows how chaotic it is to have hundreds or thousands of students pack up and move, all at once. The amount of stuff overwhelms the carrying capacity of students, parents, siblings; it overflows family vans, SUV's, available suitcases and hampers. Those socially-conscious students at Swarthmore have figured out a way to turn what would otherwise be trash into treasure:
Seeing it end up in Dumpsters bothered Swarthmore College juniors Juliana Macri and Marina Isakowitz, who decided to collect the rubbish and hold a huge tag sale, similar to those at other schools that recycle mounds of student discards for charity.
The result is the school's first Trash 2 Treasure bazaar, to be held today and tomorrow in Swarthmore's Lamb-Miller Fieldhouse with proceeds benefiting the Chester Education Fund and Chester Eastside Ministries.
For a month, the women went dorm to dorm with the school cleaning crews and scooped up an array of goods, much of them things you'd never expect to find in a student room: grills, a Christmas tree stand, a didgeridoo, walkers.
"You could outfit a house," said Macri, 20, a psychology and biology major from Durham, N.H., as she and volunteers sorted through their staggering payload, enough to fill at least half of the field house.
"A couple of houses," said Isakowitz, also 20, a Philadelphian who is majoring in English lit and education.
The sale is on the campus at Swarthmore, today and tomorrow (June15 and 16). Could it happen on every campus? If any group has the motivation and energy, it's today's college students. And the bargains aren't bad either:
Refrigerators will go for $5 to $20, futons for as little as $20. That dorm-room staple, the butterfly chair, can be had for a mere $5. Some of the castoffs will likely turn up in the cramped student quarters of other colleges this fall.
Shoes and clothing are priced to fly out the door. Among bags and bags of duds, many barely worn, were a Hollister striped shirt, a Hilfiger angora sweater, a French Connection skirt.
And how about this for a steal? Refurbished computers, some Dells, for $20 to $80. Add a printer for $5.
----excerpted from The Philadelphia Inquirer
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