Students Helping Students Reduce Waste from Move-out

by Patrick Varuzza

Patrick Varuzza (he/him) is a Masters student at NYU Tandon and is building a circular economy startup called Hubbub designed to help other students in NYC. In this blog, Patrick shares resources where you can learn more about consumer waste problems and some background about Hubbub! 

Do you recall the movie, WALL-E? It was a PIXAR film that followed a solitary robot on an uninhabitable and deserted Earth, left to clean up garbage. Though fictional, that version of the world seems increasingly realistic as humans are burning through resources so quickly that we’d need 1.5 Earths to sustain our current rate of consumption. 

We caught wind of this unsustainable trend when noticing the mountains of waste generated when students move in and out of campus each year. In the fall, boxes and packaging pile up from all the new stuff freshly delivered by big box stores and online retailers. When it’s time to move out, new piles spring up full of quality items that were barely used but would be too burdensome to keep. You can see similar waste patterns occurring all over NYC and in cities across the world as oddly enough, buying and tossing products is often the cheapest and easiest option available to us as consumers. For a glimpse into what this looks like across NYC, check out @StoopingNYC on Instagram. 

Seeing the damage this problem had on consumers and the climate inspired the launch of our circular economy startup project called Hubbub, aimed at eliminating consumer waste by making it easy and affordable for our peers and other young professionals to rent the products they need. Using Hubbub, you can rent high quality dorm and apartment items ranging from mini fridges to desk lamps, to TVs for any length of time. We deliver right to you and later pick up to make the process as easy for you as possible. Ultimately, our goal is to keep existing products out of landfill and provide people with an enjoyable, convenient and sustainable alternative to get what they need.

December NYU Move Out Waste Reduction  

This December, we’re trying out a new initiative in line with that goal. If you’re moving out this winter and have items you don’t want to keep, you can donate them to Hubbub and schedule a time for us to come pick up at your convenience! We’re hoping that this initiative will serve as a safety net for unwanted items that would otherwise just end up going to landfill. If this would be of any help to you, you can find more details on this Google Form

We unfortunately aren’t positioned yet to accept large furniture, clothes, or bedding as donations, but can take any other dorm and apartment items. As we’re still early on, we’ll work to rent out these secondhand items to generate the revenue that will then be spent on improving the Hubbub platform and expanding our capacity to serve more young consumers in NYC. Specifically, we’re currently working to build better data tools that will make our delivery and pick-up logistics more convenient for users. Eventually these incremental improvements will add up to give people all over the world a choice to reliably rent any item that they might not want to buy. 

I’ve been working on Hubbub with two peers of mine since 2020. We joined forces under the thesis that the linear model of extracting, manufacturing, then disposing of massive quantities of material is incredibly inefficient and destructive. We also believe that a global shift to a more circular economy can eliminate that damage and prevent the future from ending up like the world of WALL-E. 

If you find yourself with extra time over break and would want to dive deeper, here are a few resources that have helped us out!: 

Online Articles

Podcasts: 

Books

  • The Waste-Free World: How the Circular Economy Will Take Less, Make More, and Save the Planet by Ron Gonen
  • Donut Economics by Kate Raworth