A UT graduate student is researching the salvageable items students discard when they leave the Knoxville campus in spring. Chris Mayer has been sorting through dumpsters, cataloging the contents, and curating an art show to call attention to the waste.
While earning his PhD in rhetoric, writing and linguistics, Chris Mayer has turned his interest in dumpster diving into a passion project of interdisciplinary research and public engagement.
In spring 2025, students at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, filled 191 move-out dumpsters with unopened food, cleaning products, clothing, electronics, décor, and more. Mayer coordinated with UT’s Office of Sustainability to move two of those dumpsters to Steam Plant Hill, where he and three others logged almost 10,000 objects that could be salvaged.
“We’ve cataloged every single item in there,” Mayer said. “We found a Nintendo Switch, still logged in and charged. We found about 10 or 12 vacuum cleaners. We found air filters, many in the box and unopened. We found a couple Keurig machines that don’t have anything wrong with them. Lots of mirrors.” There were hundreds of writing implements and unused notebooks, as well as almost 2,500 cotton swabs still in their boxes.
“It was funny how many cereal bars there were,” said Ayumi Anraku, a community partner who helped Mayer and two other graduate students sort and catalog the items. “There were things that we had no idea what they were, like a face roller and electronics that we’ve never seen before.”
Efforts to Recycle and Reuse
UT has been collecting move-out items for reuse for decades, working with various partners.
Last year, nearly 42,000 pounds of material went to Goodwill. “That does not take into account the thousands of pounds of cinderblocks we recover and get sent to Horse Haven rescue, rugs and mats that get donated or recycled with carpet squares, recovering separately nonperishables and toiletries, and we are still having this level and volume of waste,” said Recycling Supervisor Brad Moats in UT’s Facilities Services Department.
“The consistency of usable materials across dumpsters reinforced that there’s still a significant gap between student intent and actual behavior at move-out,” he said.
The challenge of reducing waste is multifaceted, encompassing awareness, timing, logistics, and more.
“Move-out waste isn’t just a disposal issue—it’s a systems and behavior issue,” Moats said. “We’ve made progress through partnerships and targeted programs, but long-term improvement will come from integrating reuse and donation into the campus culture, not just promoting it seasonally. There’s a real opportunity here to reduce waste significantly while also supporting community partners.”
“We need to continue shifting toward making donation the default, not the alternative,” he said.
Some items don’t have an easy solution. Bed toppers are one of the largest pieces of waste, according to Moats, and Mayer estimates there are an average of 15 per dumpster.
Mayer and his partners spent days sorting through the two dumpsters, recording the work, and moving salvaged items into a 10-by-20-foot storage unit.
With $14,400 in funding through the Student Environmental Initiatives Fund (SEIF) and a Graduate Student Research Award, Mayer has paid for not only the storage, but safety gear, transcription of the recovery narration, video editing, and funding for artists who transformed some of the recovered goods for a March 21 exhibition titled Dumpster Treasures: From Discard to Trashterpiece.
A new $21,150 SEIF grant will fund ongoing work. “The goals are developing a method to audit a full dumpster and continuing to shift campus culture around waste,” Mayer said. In May 2026, he and others will audit every item from a move-out dumpster under a tent on campus.
Awareness Through Art
UT students and community artists created displays for the March Dumpster Treasures event at Knoxville’s Sustainable Future Center, inspired by the opportunity to contribute their talents to an effort aimed at promoting a cleaner environment.
“My entire life I’ve worked on projects like this, which my family has lovingly, and with mild annoyance, dubbed my ‘Trash Crafts,’ so this was the perfect opportunity for me,” said Mayson Messoria, a first-year cinema studies major.
Messoria created a circular, 40-inch-wide multimedia diorama titled “The Backyard Bog,” which incorporated cigarettes, glass, plastic containers, and paints recovered from the dumpsters. “I’m very passionate about our local area and keeping it clean and healthy, and I hope this will resonate with people,” she said.
From the Department of English, master’s student Talia Marshall stitched a “Trashwork Quilt” using recovered fabric, and doctoral student Hannah Trammell highlighted unused products through a display with an open-faced medicine cabinet titled “Health and Beauty at UT.”
Lindsay Svarek, a fiber and ceramics artist pursuing a master’s degree in UT’s School of Art, created a larger-than-life sculpture titled “Maya.”
Jasmine Flowers, an MFA student in creative writing and poetry, enjoys making collages from old materials, but this was the first time she has worked with items that had been thrown away.
Her interactive piece, “Headspace: Mind the Mess,” was a nod to mental health. “At times, we describe our thoughts in the same way we might talk about trash or a mess. Phrases like ‘having dirty thoughts’ or ‘clear your mind’ imply that the mind can be an unclean space,” Flowers explained.
Her piece included a whiteboard with instructions, “thoughts” represented as index card collages on a wall, a mirror with writing on it, a tote bag, and a small trash can. Audience members were prompted to read a card aloud, stick a card from the tote bag on the wall, or put a card from the wall in the trash can. “These actions represent how we decide to organize our minds,” she said.
Mayer set up a dorm room installation furnished with recovered items, and during the event student Amira Fernandez performed what it might look like to live in the space and discard many of the items that ended up in dumpsters.
The exhibition wasn’t the only time Mayer has invited UT students to use their creativity as part of his project. He also has asked them to imagine the stories behind recovered items.
Also as part of his project, Mayer placed about 1,200 unopened food and beverage items recovered from the dumpsters—and cleaned with salvaged disinfectant wipes—on shelves in English graduate student offices in Ferris Hall. Canned drinks, ramen, and popcorn were among the first consumed from what one graduate student dubbed the “food shrine.”
Room for Further Research
Before the art exhibition, Mayer had presented his research as part of UT’s Three Minute Thesis finalist competition for graduate students, and his efforts are far from over.
Although his doctoral dissertation research is about how informal social networks influence the development of graduate teaching assistants, Mayer also sees opportunity for ethnographic research on campus waste.
He has been developing a Dumpster Treasures website that documents the findings. Currently he’s using the Environmental Protection Agency’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM) tool and the spreadsheet of last year’s recovered items to estimate the greenhouse gas amounts associated with discarded items.
Mayer also sees other opportunities to share what he has learned, such as how to navigate the logistical challenges he encountered for last year’s recovery and his systematic approach for sorting through a dumpster.
“My hypothesis is that in a typical campus move-out dumpster, less than a quarter is actually trash,” he said. “I want to test that out by doing a full audit.”
At the May event his team will analyze “tiers” of trash in the dumpster, from new and unopened items through heavily used but usable and what he calls “actual trash.”
“That involves developing a systematic heuristic that we can apply to the different items,” Mayer said. “The notion of trash is a socially constructed phenomenon.” He gives the example of an open bottle of pain relievers. “If I stuck that in my suitcase and brought it home, it’s obviously not trash. If I brought it to the free store on campus, it’s not trash. But I put it there (in a dumpster) it’s trash, right? There’s a flexibility in how we conceptualize what makes trash.”
Mayer said he would also like to gain perspectives from other disciplines that may have a different lens for examining the question. His proposal for the latest grant includes providing opportunities for UT students to conduct field-based environmental research and to again turn trash into art.
He’s hoping to continue working with the Office of Sustainability and residences on campus to bring attention to the topic before students are rushing to pack up and move out after their final exams.
Anraku grew up in Brazil and lived in China, places where she said people were more likely to give away rather than throw away items. “With some preparation and planning,” she said, “this can be avoided.”
“The goal here is not to shame anybody,” Anraku said. “It’s to show how much could be saved and to change their actions.”
by Amy Beth Miller