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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.Nearly 11 years ago, the Office of the Provost announced its first Year of … at Pitt — the 2014-15 academic year would be the the Year of Sustainability.
Over the next year, Pitt established several lasting green initiatives, including the University-wide expansion of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation’s academic and research programs, the creation of a Faculty Sustainability Task Force and the launch of the first Pitt Sustainability Awards. Growing enthusiasm and increased funding also accelerated momentum for student-led environmental projects.
It was during this time that three student-led sustainability initiatives took shape in response to pressing concerns about clothing waste and affordability, food waste and insecurity and student sustainability effort coordination: the University of Thriftsburgh, Food Recovery Heroes and the Student Office of Sustainability. Today, all three efforts are cornerstones of Pitt’s sustainability infrastructure.
Keep reading to see how they’ve grown over the past decade.
From T-shirts to Thriftsburgh
Paul Heffernan (A&S ’15) still remembers the moment the idea for The University of Thriftsburgh clicked.
“We got fed up with every event having a free T-shirt and seeing tons of clothing waste all over campus,” he said. “We were broke college students without money for clothes, and we saw this obvious connection — affordable clothing demand meeting the constant supply of gently used clothes generated on campus.”
The concept was born in Instructor Ward Allebach’s sustainability course, where students addressed environmental issues they saw firsthand. Heffernan’s group launched a massive donation drive that collected more than 110,000 pieces of clothing — just shy of a world record — and helped stock a new on-campus thrift store.
When Thriftsburgh finally opened in spring 2015, Heffernan was about to graduate.
“There were times I doubted whether it would open before I finished at Pitt,” he said. “Seeing it become popular during my senior year was pretty exciting stuff.”
Since then, Thriftsburgh has become a staple on campus. The shop now processes over a ton of clothing donations per year and sells more than 10,000 items annually. It also helps organize the Clutter for a Cause zero-waste move-out event each spring and the Reuse Rummage Sale every fall.
The hands-on experiences that come with running Thriftsburgh have also helped students build practical skills over the years. Heffernan, now running a product testing company, brought experience beyond environmental knowledge to his real-world work.
“Working on something beyond a semester helped me develop time management and communication skills that ended up being way more important for my professional life than my environmental classes,” he said.
For students looking to launch their own projects, Heffernan gives simple advice: “Start, because you don’t know how you’re going to fail until you try to succeed.
“What I’m most excited about is not that the project is still going, but that there are still students that are interested in having that positive impact in the world ... that they’re passionate about it and are willing to commit to that mission.”
Students feeding students
While Thriftsburgh tackled textile waste, another group of students focused on finding a solution to food waste and food insecurity on campus. They soon launched Food Recovery Heroes as part of the national Food Recovery Network, which mobilizes students across the U.S. to reduce food waste and hunger by redirecting surplus meals to local nonprofits.
Jessica Simon (A&S, SOC WK ’17) was one of the first volunteers to join. “I signed up outside the student union one day and was hooked,” she said. “I started helping with logistics and coordinating donations, and pretty soon, it was a major part of my college life.”
Transportation was the group’s biggest headache. “A lot of students didn’t have cars, but we needed to move food fast,” Simon said. The group partnered with Zipcar and even used a bike trailer to bridge the gap, sometimes hauling trays of uneaten meals by bicycle through the streets of Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood.
Since 2014, the group has worked with Pitt Dining Services to recover nearly 250,000 pounds of surplus food from dining halls and other campus locations, redistributing it to the Pitt Pantry and local hunger relief organizations, including Jubilee Soup Kitchen, Wilkinsburg Community Ministry and Street Medicine at Pitt.
Simon now works at a national public health association supporting maternal and child health and credits Food Rescue Heroes for helping shape her views on collective action. “FRH showed me that change is possible when communities and organizations have the tools and infrastructure they need and that motivated, values-driven young people can be a big part of that change with the right support and policies in place,” she said.
A hub for student sustainability
As Thriftsburgh and Food Recovery Heroes addressed specific needs, the Student Office of Sustainability (SOOS) was evolving from a loose collective into a structured University initiative, thanks in part to Chelsea Huddleston’s (A&S ’18) leadership.
As the inaugural SOOS director, Huddleston helped create a collaborative hub in William Pitt Union for roughly 20 sustainability-related student groups. The SOOS organized events to connect students across initiatives, assisted with dining hall waste audits and helped advance collection of compostable materials on campus.
“There were a bunch of amazing student groups working in isolation,” Huddleston said. “Our goal was to bring them together and make sustainability feel cohesive.”
A big milestone for the group came during the 2016-17 academic year, when student representatives helped develop the first Pitt Sustainability Plan, ensuring student priorities shaped University strategy.
"It felt really exciting to feel like other people were excited about the same things," Huddleston said about the planning process. "Even though we were cobbling together things from different departments, a lot of people at Pitt were excited about moving in the same direction that we were."
And it’s not the only way she’s seen student-led initiatives like SOOS lead to institutional change.
By the time she graduated, the Office of Sustainability was founded. “The University put the effort in to write the Sustainability Plan, and now there’s a formal department that’s brought together organizations and schools across the University,” Huddleston said. “It was a really beautiful experience as an undergrad to witness the power of that community growth.”
Top photo courtesy of Chelsea Huddleston. The SOOS Green Team, including Young Grgurus (A&S ’19), left, and William Kerr (A&S ’19), collects waste at the Chancellor’s Picnic in August 2017.