An old storefront became NYU's first student-run Swap Shop that offers free donated dorm items to students. Most inventory came from donation bins at six dorms and was sorted, tested, and cleaned by an undergraduate-led pilot project. The Swap Shop intends to prevent usable items from entering the waste stream and to make secondhand options more convenient than buying new. The initiative addresses a recurring dorm-trash problem driven by many out-of-state and international students who cannot easily transport belongings home. The shop opens to students and will remain until shelves are depleted.
An old grocery store at 111 Second Avenue is reopening this weekend with a very different stock: yoga mats at the deli counter, picture frames in the produce, and 124 microwaves down two aisles. There's one armchair, one armoire, one pair of ballet pointe shoes, and 37 desk lamps. But there are no cashiers. That's because all of it is free, courtesy of NYU's first Swap Shop, which opens on Saturday to students only
The goods aren't coming from the university; almost everything on the shelves came from the donation bins at six dorms last spring, and an undergrad-led pilot project has been organizing the piles into something resembling a store. "We just want to help students stop items from entering the waste cycle," says Kate Koblegarde, an environmental econ major who proposed the idea in student government, then worked throughout the summer to get it off the ground: clearing out the storefront, testing the items, cleaning them,
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