SURPLUS AVAILABLE

• BROTHER TYPEWRITER:
  Model # EM0539 electric typewriter with cover, stand, and user's guide. Please contact us if you want to pick up this item located in a building on the Cambridge campus.
• Oak Map Case 3’ x 3’ x 16";
  drawers 48" x 33"
• Locking Storage Cabinet 36" x 72" x 12"

 

SURPLUS FURNITURE

Surplus furniture and other items are available at our Recycling and Surplus Center in Allston every Thursday 11-2! If donating furniture, please instruct your movers to contact us 24 hours before delivery rob_gogan at harvard dot edu so that we can receive and display everything safely. We can take material only from Harvard buildings which use our waste and recycling services, and we can never receive any trash or hazardous waste.

When donating file cabinets and desks, please unlock, open up and clean out all drawers. We cannot receive any furniture with unknown contents. Likewise, please make sure all computers, smart phones and other electronic devices are purged of any confidential information. Harvard recycling does not shred or otherwise destroy any confidential materials we pick up or that are delivered to the recycling and surplus center. Thus it is the responsibility of the donor or recycler to make proper arrangements to protect confidential information. Please call us if you need extra recycling barrels or more pickups when cleaning out offices and furniture. Also, please ask us for contact information for confidential destruction vendors serving the campus.

Please keep in mind that parking space limitations force us to be STRICT ABOUT PARKING RULES. Please respect our neighbors' need to maintain safe traffic flow around the Recycling and Surplus Center. When here for Thursday's Surplus Distribution, follow the parking monitor’s direction and park only in designated areas. You may also park in the free spaces in the streets adjacent to the property. If you are interested in seeing any of the items now available, come to our Recycling and Surplus Center at 175 North Harvard Street in Allston any Thursday from 11 to 2 PM. A street map showing our location is here. Everything is free, first-come, first-served and open to everyone.

The Divinity School’s Jyoti Rana and Ralph DeFlorio show off Rockefeller Refectory recycling and composting 3-holer receptacle. Note Ralph’s (unposed) reusable mug!

DIVINITY SCHOOL RECYCLES 70%.  New bag count data taken campus-wide shows that HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL captures 70% of its refuse for recycling or composting, leading all campus faculties. HDS was the first campus to offer composting in every building. All offices, classrooms, dining areas and meeting rooms have SingleStream recycling receptacles next to their matching-style trash cans. The school also has a permanent electronics recycling station for all computers, e-media (CD’s, tapes, DVD’s), speakers, cords, plugs, power sources. “We have a great rapport with the students, staff and faculty here. We meet often with the EcoDiv group,” says Roy Lauridsen, Congratulations to Roy, Jyoti Rana, Ralph DeFlorio, student Emma Crossen, Paul Corbett, and many others on the HDS Green Team!.

Other notable recyclers include HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN with a recycling rate of 65%. HGSD’s newest innovation was recovery of wood scraps and sawdust for mulch. Last year, the GSD’s Chauhaus was the first retail café on campus to separate and recover food scraps and biodegradable serviceware for composting. The School of ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES also beat the campus average with a rate of 60%. SEAS has one of the most successful electronics recovery programs on campus, which is important since this makes up over 30% of their waste stream by weight. SEAS’s achievement is even more remarkable since they have no composting there to date.

The big story in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is that two laboratories made dramatic improvements. The HARVARD SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS switched to SingleStream recycling specifications and boosted their recycling rate from an unremarkable 40% to an above-average 56%, thanks to the efforts of Charlie Hickey, Joel Duckett, the CfA Green Team and the Office for Sustainability, including Philip Kreycik, Dara Olmsted and Gosia Sklodowska! Zach Berta and Allison Farmer, two graduate students there, are pioneering an effort to provide reusable mugs and plates for CfA kitchen areas. Harvard Recycling provided over 100 items from Surplus Distribution for this purpose. Please contact us if you’d like us to keep an eye out for reusable serviceware for your department or program, and send us counts needed. Keep in mind that most of the mugs we receive have commercial advertising glazed on. At JEFFERSON LABORATORIES, Stuart McNeil and Jay McNeil led their building to rise from a 57% recycling rate to 75%. Clear, well-labeled trash and recycling stations proliferate in every room and hallway of the building. Their kitchen areas boast abundant storage spaces and dishwashers to accommodate reusable serviceware. This year, Stuart and Jay are working on implementing a composting program that will cut their waste even further.

We have recycling rates for every campus building we service. Please let us know if you want to know your building’s rate and how to improve it!

James Powers ’09, 3rd Place, 2007 "CERtoon" contest

HARVARD LEAPS TO 3rd PLACE

HARVARD LEAPS TO 3rd place out of 608 campuses competing for the 2010 RecycleMania "Gorilla Prize" for most tons recovered for recycling. We are only 8 tons behind STANFORD through Week 5! Happily, Harvard is 20 pounds per capita below Yale in Waste Minimization. Alas, BROWN and UPENN are ahead of us by 3 pounds. Even more alarming, YALE is recovering 3 pounds per person more than we are in the Per Capita Challenge. So make less trash and more recycling over the remaining days of the 10-week contest so we can “talk trash” to our fellow Ivy Leaguers.
See the full results here.

HARVARD COSMETICS DRIVE

Harvard Cosmetics Drive helps CAMBRIDGE FAMILY SHELTER celebrate Valentine's Day! A truckload of lip balm, shampoo, soaps, nail polish and body lotions was recovered from over 40 locations across campus for the Eighth Annual Valentine's Day Cosmetics Drive. Thanks so much to all volunteers, including Stephen Coughlin and Carol Healy—and read Carol’s write-up below (HBS), Kris Locke (CommuterChoice), Sheila Ferguson (Jefferson Lab), Linda Endicott (HGSE), Laura Eagan (HUHS), Jen Piazza (Radcliffe), Janet Evans (CfA), Marcia Diehl (Tozzer Library), Whitney Bestwick, (Strategic Procurement), Nancy Shafman (Music Building), Betsy Shortell and her amazing collection crew (Mail Services), Larry Paige (Head House), Cathy Lehar (Bureau of Study Counsel), Henry Kesner (Alumni & Development), Barbara Wiberg (Peabody Museum), Maureen McCarthy (Barker Center), Roy Lauridsen & Bronwen Murphy (Divinity School), Sharon Lorince (Athletics), and Undergraduate House Champion Paul Hegarty and REPs Gracie Brown and Molly O’Laughlin (Leverett House)!

Collection of Articles on Waste Reduction

As usual, Harvard's Office for Sustainability (OFS) has a wonderful collection of articles on Waste Reduction on its website. Read below:
Carol Healy of the Office for Sustainability writes about HBS Green Living's Valentine's Cosmetics Drive, including photo of the dynamic GGL Rep Jenny Liu here.

SHORT GREEN VIDEO CLIPS

Harvard’s Office for Sustainability is sponsoring a competition for SHORT GREEN VIDEO CLIPS highlighting how individual actions can help reduce environmental impacts at Harvard, and they want you to submit!! First prize wins $700 and second wins $300—plus both videos will be publicly screened at Harvard’s first-ever Green Carpet Awards ceremony taking place later this spring (exact date TBD) honoring environmental work on campus. The goal of the project is to educate and inspire students to make changes on campus through humor, creativity and powerful messaging. Read below for more details and rules of the competition, and definitely check out of any following recommended videos for inspiration. Deadline to submit is Thursday, April 15. Please contact us at sustainability at harvard dot edu with any questions about the competition.
www.green.harvard.edu/greencarpet

HARVARD COMPUTERS ON WBZ

HARVARD COMPUTERS ON WBZ's "One Last Thing" broadcast Tuesday, 2-9-10. Some of the computers Harvard Recycling picks up get refurbished and sold to non-profit organizations locally and around the world (including Liberia and Haiti) by the high-school aged kids at the LABBB program. See the broadcast here.

To buy refurbished inexpensive Harvard computers, check out this website.

ECO-REP

See this nice article about the Eco-Rep program at our sister Ivy League campus, UPenn, from Waste and Recycling News. Note that Penn's program was "Following the lead of similar successful programs at other college campuses around the country". Harvard's REP program was the first of its kind, and has been successfully reducing Harvard's trash and increasing recycling since 2002.

 

CAMPUS NATURE WATCH

• RED-TAILED HAWKS return to white pine tree on Oxford Street near Pierce Hall that was meticulously spared and protected during LISE construction. Hawks return to nest mid-February and copulate there at the end of the month… Red-tailed flies from Swedenborg Church past Gund and off towards Harvard Yard… Of two Red-tails circling high above the Carpenter Center, one suddenly drops low to the building, then flies across the street as far as Lamont, then joins its mate circling high above the Barker Center.
  
  
• PEREGRINE FALCON perches atop the First Parish Church across from Johnston Gate of Harvard Yard. [The same?] Peregrine Falcon flies high into the tall tree inside the gate to the Barker Center and stays there for a long time, looking around all the while.
  
  
• AMERICAN TREE SPARROW pauses in front of the MCZ building on Oxford Street.
  
  
• BLUE JAY screams like a hawk as it flies from Pusey to the depths of the Yard. Several students are amazed that the sounds came from the jay.
  
  
• In front of the Carpenter Center a distinct call of a DOWNY WOODPECKER female rings from a tall oak as she pecks for bark-burrowed insects.
  
  
• A group of ROBINS bickers over the small dark berries of the ivy climbing up the facade of the Fogg.
  
  
• FACULTY CLUB FEED-FEST: Binoculars assist this report: ROBINS line high on the side of the Faculty Club, while others flock to the crab apple trees between the Fogg and the Carpenter Center. Then smaller birds emerge from the crab apples; one flies into the tall tree on the side of the Carpenter--a female DOWNY WOODPECKER. Later a second flies in. Higher in the same tree--a YELLOW BELLIED SAPSUCKER (F). After a long time the sapsucker flies to a tree at the back of the Club. Flock of two dozen CEDAR WAXWINGS feed by grabbing a fruit, then flying to the tall tree on the side of Robinson to eat at leisure. Suddenly from the Yard a juvenile sapsucker flies into the tall tree to join the adult already there.
  
  
• Male Yellow-bellied sapsucker flies into the tree by Pusey.
  
  
• CARDINALS in magnificent crimson plumage sing mating calls across from Busch and near 46 Blackstone Street… Cardinal lands on the crab apple on the roof of Pusey while a Downy whinneys nearby.
  
  
• Chickadee flies into the tall tree in front of Loeb House, while another is poised acrobatically upside down.
  
  
• CANADA GEESE and MALLARDS strut on the ice in front of the Weld Boathouse, drinking from small open water holes surrounded by winter ice… On the thinly-snowed ground next to the Boathouse, frozen Canada goose footprints form snowflake-shaped stars.
  
  
• Pussywillow-like buds swell on the Magnolia in front of Boylston and on the side of Wadsworth.
  
  
• WITCH HAZEL blooms brighten Biology courtyard, Mallinckrodt, and the back of Widener.
  
  

Thanks to Campus Nature Watchers Sonia Ketchian, Bob Stymeist, Jeremiah Trimble and Sally Young!

 

Contact Us

For information concerning Recycling and Solid Waste Removal, contact Rob Gogan, Supervisor of Recycling and Solid Waste Removal at 617-495-3042, or email rob_gogan at harvard dot edu