University of Minnesota Recycling Program

08/13/2024

🚨 Attention Students! 🚨 Help keep our Gopher Football Games sustainable and earn $24/hour! 💸 Apply now on My U Careers by searching "Gameday Student Laborer" or Job ID #363883

06/06/2023

***BIKE SALE 2023***
It's just one week away!

Sale starts Saturday June 10th at 10am, rain or shine. Join us an our great partners Mr. Michael Recycles Bicycles and Full Cycle.
We will start letting people in 5 at a time every three minutes until everyone can come through.
We have an estimated 325+ bikes that are all fixed and ready to ride away on. Prices start around $50 for some bikes and go up from there. We have a good selection of low end, mid range and nice rides for you to choose from in many shapes, sizes and colors.
We do not have any fat tire, three wheel or e-bikes available this year.
The sale will be held in the parking/loading dock area at our warehouse located at 883 29th Ave SE, Minneapolis MN 55414.
Some really dedicated bike enthusiasts do come early to get in line and queue up, but normally the line does not start growing until between 9am and 10am, but that is up to all of you, not us.

05/18/2023

01/23/2023

"Reusing has environmental benefits beyond saving landfill space. Picking up something that's used avoids all the carbon emissions and other impacts involved in harvesting raw materials, producing and transporting a new product, according to the Environmental Protection Agency."

"Materials that are made and sold today are not as good of quality," Tanner said. "Ikea desks are not going to be in this warehouse in 30 years, but tanker desks from 1950 are."

The University of Minnesota’s ReUse Program diverts hundreds of tons of material from landfills and incineration each year.

01/03/2023

12/29/2022

12/29/2022

University of Minnesota Reuse Program is open for public shopping today, 8:30am - 5pm. Follow their page for reuse updates, puns, and entertainment!

08/19/2022

Apply to be a Sustainability Advocate in your residence hall! Apply by September 12th:
z.umn.edu/sustadvocates
UMN Housing & Residential Life

06/11/2022

Today is the day! Get your bikes at the University of Minnesota Reuse Program. The sale starts at 10am, rain or shine.

06/08/2022

ReUse/Recycling facts

Here on the Twin Cities campuses, we operate our own MRF (Materials Recovery Facility). We consolidate recyclables from around campus, sort them by material and when we have enough, we sell the recyclable materials. That means we can recycle items and materials that cannot be recovered by large single sort automated MRF's.

So where do our materials go? Let's look at some plastics. When we send out trucks full of lab plastics, can top holders (think hard beer 6-packs), planting tags, bee cages, swim lane dividers, 5 gallon buckets, bales of HDPE ( #2's), some bales of PP ( #5) they are being sold to Avon plastics. From us they head off to a sorting/chipping facility in Sauk Rapids to be washed, analyzed and shredded into pellets. As needed Avon sends pellets to it's Paynesville location for production into a number of products that you can find at Home Depot, Lowes, Menards and other retailers. The brand names you would see at the store level are Armadillo, Master Mark, Grid Axcents, Quix tile and Turboclip.

Not only can we recycle materials that large MRF's can't, we also know where they are going!

Thanks University of Minnesota Recycling Program!

FYI, those rigid beer can holders are super recyclable, but they cannot be put in your curbside single sort recycling bin at home. That's because large automated MRF's use optical scanners and automation that cannot process thin plastic items like those rigid beer can holders.