Weber State University’s Energy and Sustainability Office is hosting a swap meet on Jan. 25 and 26. WSU’s students, faculty and community have been able to participate by donating or receiving items from the swap meet.

The two-day event is being held in the Shepherd Union Ballroom A from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The first day of the event was dedicated to collecting items while the second day will be dedicated to giving those items out for free.

“The purpose of this is to just engage the community with our sustainability goals,” Hunter Riccardelli, WSU’s Food Recovery Network president and Zero Waste coordinator, said. “We have guidelines. We’re trying to achieve 90% waste diversion by 2050, and then 50% by 2030. That means just keeping 90% of our waste out of the landfill.”

WSU community members during the first day could donate clothing, school supplies, housewares, games, toys, books, sporting goods and electronics on Jan. 25 and were invited to return the following day to get free items from the swap.

The idea behind the event is to push WSU to become more waste-free. Instead of throwing away older items, people can give them to the swap, and someone else can use them for whatever they need. All the items donated on the first day of the swap were weighed in order to calculate exactly how much waste is being saved from landfills.

“It’s a program where people bring in their used clothes, and they just donate them to other students who are in need,” Seth Anderson, an intern for the department’s environmental compliance division, said.

WSU’s Energy and Sustainability Office aims to lower WSU’s energy consumption and waste. The department has made many efforts to achieve these goals, including adding more solar panels to WSU’s campus and updating the Stomberg Complex’s workout equipment so that many of the machines in the gym area create electricity to power parts of WSU’s campus.

Following the thrift swap, the department will be holding an Intermountain Sustainability Summit on March 23 and 24 that students and faculty can register for to learn more about WSU’s commitment to sustainability.

“We want to encourage anyone in the community — faculty, students, staff — to just come here, bring anything that they don’t need, come back, take anything that they’d like; just overall reduce waste,” Riccardelli said.