The UMass Amherst campus thrift store and reuse program, New2U, has won an award from the advocacy group MassRecycle for their leadership in waste-diversion, reuse, and assisting with the recovery effort after a major fire in 2025. 

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The store earned recognition in the College/University category of MassRecycle’s annual awards, which recognize individuals and organizations that make a significant impact in recycling and waste reduction in Massachusetts. 

The Olympia Place fire on Nov. 7, 2025, took place at an off-campus housing complex and displaced over 200 residents, most of them UMass Amherst students. This left them in need of all of life’s essentials—from clothing to furniture. 

Laurie Simmons, assistant campus sustainability manager, oversees New2U. She said in the immediate aftermath of the blaze, with the community offering an overwhelming amount of donations to assist those affected, New2U was tasked with helping to take in clothing and goods to help the fire victims. Its store in the Hampden Commons became a centralized site to accept donations, and to disburse them.

She is proud of how the community rallied to assist the residents and of the job her team did in the wake of a disaster, Simmons said.

“We are used to handling large volumes of donations,” Simmons said. “We have a volunteer network that we can mobilize very quickly. And so that’s what we did. We stepped up, we got thousands and thousands of donations every day. The lobby was overflowing.”

Simmons said a storage area was transitioned into additional space to display the donated clothing, using borrowed and donated racks. 

“Over 100 of the Olympia Place students came in and took advantage of the resources,” she said. “Many of them came in multiple times. They had free access to all of the clothing, footwear, bags, backpacks, toiletries. All of the donations that came in, they had free unlimited access to.”

Impacted students were also given $100 vouchers to cover items such as electronics and furnishings that New2U already had on hand. 

The New2U Thrift Store is open during the academic year for both shopping and donating. A large part of its effort is focused on the residence hall move-out period, when many unwanted items are donated by departing students—and then again when students return to campus. A large tag sale is held each September featuring items students often need as they settle in.

Although the thrift store has been open since 2025, the New2U initiative has been in place in other ways for over a decade. Over that time, more than 200,000 pounds of items have been reused and kept out of landfills.