In the dark depths of the Business Building’s basement, a group of students are hard at work. They have spent tireless hours sorting through kitchenware, bedding and clothes. Which have all been passed down from Students of Trinity Past. The commotion beneath the paved grounds of Trinity is all in preparation for Trash to Treasure, Trinity’s largest student-to-student thrifting event, which is set to take place on September 17th and 18th in the Naughton Institute.
The initiative itself was introduced in 2019, but had a three-year hiatus due to COVID. It wasn’t until 2023 that the concept was revived by Nicole Hennessy, a fourth year political science and sociology student. In the spring of 2024, Toto Daly, a first-year English student at the time, took over the role from a burnt-out Hennessy.
“Perhaps the other people in the room had more knowledge about what I was getting into,” she jokes, reflecting on the lack of raised hands when she put herself forward at the Green Committee meeting.
Last year’s team managed to take the Trash to Treasure event from a volunteer-based event with an annual revenue of €2,000 to a self-sustaining, €4,500 profit endeavour, which fully covered costs and wages. The event collectively saved students a total of €32,000 on essentials, as well as diverting more than 3,000 items from landfills, preventing 14,000 kg of CO₂ emissions.
The initiative is now entirely circular, meaning that the materials used to set up the event, such as the crates used to store and display the items, were all sourced second-hand. The circularity pertains to the initiative’s economy as well, with all proceeds going into setting up the event again the following year.
But the road to these impressive results was long and not without difficulty. When Daly took over, the initiative was entirely volunteer-based, and all the proceeds from the event went into the Green Campus Committee. This resulted in a tapped out fund by the end of every year, meaning that the volunteers had to start from zero every time.
Seeing all the work and effort put in by Nicole Hennessy, and acknowledging the fact that the initiative’s economy was unsustainable, Daly decided to change this, starting with securing funding to cover wages and the cost of setting up.
In March of 2024, Daly put in a request for €3,000 to Trinity Sustainability, but it wasn’t until August that the Sustainability department responded to her. The offering: €300 – one tenth of the original request – and One4All vouchers for the students working the event.
“It was an incredibly disappointing, tokenistic gesture, and it also reinforces this idea that sustainability and sustainability work is a matter of goodwill and charity,” Daly tells The University Times.
Céilí Ní Raithilidh for the University Times
It wasn’t until Daly went directly to Jenny Maguire and the Student Union that a sum of €1,000 was donated to the initiative. But the delays resulted in a three-week sprint for herself, Alfredo Guzzinati and Melis Asiyo, in order to make up for lost time: “we worked non-stop out of this shipping container backing onto tarmac,” she says, showing photos of herself and Asiyo dwarfed by the greys and blues of a metal container.
The bright ground floor of the Naughton Institute serves as a fitting indicator of how far they’ve come since Daly passed the baton – bundles of duvets are organised by single or double, carefully stacked with matching bed linen and sheets in an array of pastels and whites.
Everything about the operation seems thought out and deliberate – a result, undoubtedly, of the resources and time that have finally been put into the initiative. The operation now run by Amelia Flanagan, Environmental Officer in the TCDSU/AMLCT, differs greatly from the humble beginnings detailed by Daly.
Flanagan and her team have been sorting on and off since June, and are just now setting up for the final sprint before the event next week. Finn and Aoife, two of the students involved, are neatly folding and sorting bed linen, as Daly observes in awe.
“Throughout the whole initiative, I really felt like we were supported. The most disappointing thing was the amount of hard work it took to convince the university to be on board with this new way of doing things – because we could have just done it how it had always been done, and Flanagan would be doing it that exact same way this year,” Daly reflects.
“- and I would have had a much more stressful and lonely experience,” Flanagan interjects.
Flanagan’s motto, “Caring for the environment means caring about people,” perfectly sums up the new and improved Trash to Treasure. Great care has been taken to ensure that the quality of the items being sold is high, as the team explained to The University Times, they don’t sell anything they wouldn’t wear or use themselves. All the duvets, linen, clothes, etc, have been carefully cleaned in laundromats and subsequently organised and bundled by the Trash to Treasure team: “We care about you, we care about what you receive,” Flanagan says.
However, the items displayed at Trash to Treasure are only about one-fifth of what is left behind by Trinity students each year. Of all the items thrown away, the vast majority will end up at garbage incineration plants. Clothes, kitchen utensils and other household items otherwise in perfect condition are discarded without the slightest hope of being given a second chance.
The issue that Flanagan identifies is not a lack of goodwill or care, but rather that the logistics aren’t set up in a way that makes reusing items the natural option: “The bins aren’t set up in the right way. People would take the right choice if it was presented to them”, she says,
“but the only bins that were made available to students were general waste bins, which go straight to the landfill. The only other option was the collection in the Atrium, and people obviously didn’t know about it.”
Despite good intentions, initiatives like Trash to Treasure are often overlooked due to lack of awareness rather than disinterest. While Trash to Treasure has come a long way, it still relies on the cooperation of the student body to succeed. This not only means buying consciously – preferably at the Trash to Treasure bedding pre-sale on September 12th from 10am to 4pm, as well as the main days on September 17th and 18th from 9am to 5pm – but also disposing consciously.
It might still seem unintuitive to take responsibility for things that are, after all, seen as nothing but trash. But if one lesson can be taken from Daly and Flanagan’s endeavour, it’s that anything can be turned into treasure – if only you put in the effort.
