Trashed: College students leave a lot behind

Boragine, who started a resale program at the University of Richmond when she was teaching there, said she can tell the difference between a school with a $20,000 price tag and a $40,000 one just by looking at what gets left behind.

"Instead of the dollar-store scissors, you'd probably find the $7 ergonomically correct scissors," she said. Rather than a hand-me-down TV that no longer works, there is a year-old one that is too heavy to ship.

Mostly, however, the left-behind items are the predictable, timeless staples of college life: casual clothes, low-grade furniture, countless unopened Ramen noodles. Penn State's sale features about 4,000 carpets, along with stacks of sweaters and T-shirts running down a row 100 feet long and 3 feet wide.

Those essentials are more useful to the charities than high-end appliances are. Texas State University-San Marcos, which serves a high poverty area, gave clothes and other items to about 1,000 needy people last year. Among the groups that collect from BC is The Second Step, an organization for domestic violence survivors, many of whom are trying to set up their own households and often don't have things like furniture and cookware.

At Penn State's annual sale, where nothing goes for more than $20, "there are folks looking for a bargains," said Al Matyasovsky, who heads the effort there. But, he added: "There are also people in the surrounding community that need this and can only afford the $4 pair of jeans."

The service project is now among the biggest on Davidson's campus, about 20 miles north of Charlotte.

Snake left in one drawer
Senior Liz Dover said locals have grown accustomed to post-graduation Dumpster-diving on campus — so much so that volunteers now sleep on the pile of couches in the yard to keep them from being taken. If people really need something, they are sent to Goodwill and other charity groups where the donated goods wind up.

"We don't donate anything if it's dirty or has holes, unless it's Abercrombie style and it's supposed to be dirty and have holes," Dover said.

Eventually, the cartloads of sweat shirts and acres of carpet blur together, and it's the more colorful left-behind items that stick out. A six-foot boa constrictor got left in a drawer at the University of Florida a while back; a three-foot inflatable Jesus turned up at Bates College. This year's haul at Colgate includes a gross of chopsticks, a walking cast and a disco ball.

Some find anthropological significance in the mixture of the odd and humdrum.

A typical catch might include "hula hoops, dishes, a can opener, a couple of condoms and notebook paper," said Kim Yarbray, environmental sustainability coordinator at Guilford College, also in North Carolina. She sees it as a kind of symbol of the intersecting stages of life of college students: childhood playfulness, adolescent experimentation, the first tools for adults who must work and take care of themselves.

"Their whole life is right there," she said. "You can just see it in the things they choose to discard."

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