PROVIDENCE — Two East Side women have a concept of a plan to stop clothes, vacuums, furniture, and books from being buried in Johnston.

After our publisher and my wife, Joanna Detz, and I spoke with the duo last week, at Coffee Exchange on Wickenden Street, ecoRI News agreed to work with them to find a solution. I volunteered to be a grunt.

College move-out carelessness is a problem that mars the state capital every spring. Neighborhoods around Brown University are routinely littered with abandoned clothing, comforters, sheets, electronics, picture frames, books, unused notebooks, plastic shelving, shoe racks, cleaning supplies and other household items, food (some 42 tons nationwide), and beat-up furniture in need of a little TLC.

The average college student living in a dormitory generates an estimated 640 pounds of waste annually, with extreme waste coming at the end of the academic year, according to a study published in March. These spring spikes are what concern Sara Dorsch and Carolyn Birnbaum.

The amount of reusable and still usable stuff left behind this year was particularly staggering, according to the women. They both noted unopened food was casually thrown to the curb. Dorsch snagged unopened bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette. They said discarded mini fridges were aplenty.

“There was so much stuff, like totally usable stuff,” Birnbaum said. “I ended up with all this stuff that’s in my garage, just bags and bags of clothing. My husband is a physician at Rhode Island Hospital. There was a patient who had been in the hospital for weeks and was going into rehab. I don’t know the situation, but [they] had no clothing, and I was like, ‘No problem.’ I washed a big bag of clothes, and off it went.”

Birnbaum also recovered a red floor lamp in excellent condition, which she said had a retail value of $700. It’s now in her living room. Her daughter is starting graduate school in the fall, and thanks to Brown University students, she won’t need to buy any notebooks.

The piles of usable stuff recently forsaken got the friends thinking about a solution. They contacted ecoRI News to talk through some ideas. As a side hustle to help fund our journalism, we used to clean up road races and collect food scrap. We hold an annual Regift Sale — a collective indoor yard sale — in December at Flatbread Company Providence. Dorsch and Birnbaum believed we could provide some insight. They were half right: my wife and ecoRI News co-founder offered some ideas. I took notes.

“I think we’re at a point where we’re trying to figure out what is the next logical step, which, of course, is to reach out to Brown, but I think we need to go to Brown with an action plan,” Dorsch said. “I didn’t know if you guys would have any thoughts because you were collecting and doing stuff before and what you think might work well?”

Dorsch said the first step is how to get students and Brown University to participate. Getting all this usable stuff to homeless shelters, food pantries, libraries, public schools, and nonprofits is another challenge.

“I think there has to be buy-in earlier. There needs to be awareness,” Detz said. “People need to understand about the landfill, the need in the community, how your stuff can make an impact in somebody’s life.”

Most of the easily reusable dormitory items abandoned curbside or left near dumpsters — besides what the duo and other residents who live near Brown University rescue — end up taking up valuable space in the ever-shrinking Central Landfill.

Dorsch and Birnbaum believe this waste could be significantly minimized through proactive, large-scale collection efforts, with some education mixed in, that gives all this useful stuff a second life.

“It just seems like so much more could be done,” Birnbaum said. “They could be giving back to the community in a way that virtually costs them nothing.”

Brown University is hardly the lone offender. Similar heaps of waste are also created at Providence College, Johnson & Wales University, Rhode Island College, and the Rhode Island School of Design — just at different heights. The Brown University heap is the highest.

The problem isn’t even limited to Rhode Island. At Tufts University in Medford and Somerville, Mass., school officials have noted there is a significant spike in the amount of waste generated on campus during May and June, when their students annually abandon some 230 tons of stuff, much of it still usable.

Each of Providence’s institutions of higher learning have programs in place and offer guidance to help students, faculty, and staff navigate the challenges of reducing end-of-year wastefulness. The problem, obviously, isn’t a high priority, however.

“Our landfill is on its last legs, so this, in our minds, has this double whammy of filling up the landfill and not being used by people who could use this stuff,” Dorsch said. “We’re filling up a landfill and we have no plan on where we’re going to get rid of our trash. If we could cut down the trash, that would be great.”

Note: If you are interested in working on a way to redistribute these items in the future, please email me at [email protected].

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.