Jumbo Drop No More; It's Time to R2ePack!

by Dawn Quirk

As people may have heard, we no longer have the Jumbo Drop program at Tufts University. This year we are trying something different. The Jumbo Drop program has been renamed the R2epack project. R2epack is an acronym for Reuse. Recycle Everything. Pack and Clean…`K?! The project has transitioned away from encouraging students to donate usable goods to Jumbo Drop which would then be sorted and stored over the summer and sold at a fall yard sale, to one of encouraging conservation.

This change in Jumbo Drop is coming as the beginning of a complete overhaul of the Jumbo Drop system, in conjunction with the burgeoning Zero Waste campaign at Tufts. Ultimately, we hope to reinstate a system where the off casts of one year’s students are available to the next year as an alternative to buying new goods, but the previous method was broken and we saw the need to fix it.

We are beginning that overhaul this year with Lewis Hall. Because Tufts Recycles! has storage facilities in Lewis, it will be the site of a pilot program of a new “freecycle” project. The pilot project will offer a collection box for specific donations of basic dorm necessities. The items will be stored in the dorm over the summer and offered free to the returning students when the dorm reopens in the fall. If successful this project will be duplicated in other dorms. The long term goal would be to have one in every dorm able to accommodate the necessary storage space. The freecycle project would add back in the reuse component of Jumbo Drop while substantially cutting operating costs and logistics, thereby reducing the need to resell items at a fall yard sale.

It is our hope that this more localized method will encourage students to decrease their consumption of new goods, while saving money and creating a community event at the same time.

Look for a list of items that Tufts Recycles! will be accepting for this reuse program in Lewis Hall. And if you don’t live in Lewis or want your dorm to be able to facilitate something like this in the years to come, let Tufts Recycles! know, let your Resident Assistants know, and let the Office of Residential Life know. Don’t be silent, get excited. Zero Waste can happen at Tufts and it can make your lives much easier in the process.