Reuse
A key strategy to reducing campus waste involves integrating principles of a circular economy that prioritizes reuse, recovery, and refurbishment of existing materials and products.
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The Fall Tag Sale is a joint effort between the First Congregational Church and ABC Clothing Sale. As mentioned above in the Give It Up! section, volunteers clean, organize, and store donated items over the summer and offer them to students at affordable prices when students move back to campus. The Tag Sale is typically held on move-in day for First Years during First Days, with a pre-sale open to international students and First Gen students they week before during their pre-orientation.
Tag Sale in the First Congregational Church 
Stickers indicating the prices of most Tag Sale items. 
Examples of items sold at the Tag Sale 
You can also find these items at the Tag Sale.
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Gently used clothes can be given a new life by donating them to one of the clothing donation programs in town.
ABC Clothing is a local non-profit on Spring Street, the proceeds from which "benefit local charitable organizations that serve youth and families at risk and address hunger, poverty, and inequality in our community." You can donate your gently used clothes at the drop boxes in the back of the Paresky Center or by putting them in the Give It Up! pods at the end of the spring semester.In the Spring of 2023, Williams YDSA and Williams Mutual Aid launched a FreeStore is on the second floor of Goodrich above the Coffee Bar. They accept all clothing/shoes, school supplies, unused hygiene products and nonperishable unopened food items, linens and household items. The goals of the FreeStore are providing mutual aid among students and reducing waste sent to landfills. Read more in the article written by one of the organizers.
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The Zilkha Center for the Environment’s (ZCE) Reusable Dish Kits are sets of lightweight dinner plates, glasses, and silverware that can be reserved for group gatherings as a substitute for disposable paper and plastic dishware. A way to implement sustainability into event planning on-campus, the Dish Kit program reduces unnecessary event waste. Divided into storage containers for ease of transport, each kit contains dishware sets serving roughly 12-15 people. After a brief training with ZCE staff on how to use the kits, student group leaders, TAs, and college faculty and staff can reserve a kit!
Fill out this form, which is used for Envi Center kitchen trainings and Reusable Dish Kit trainings, to schedule a training and reserve a Kit.
The Davis Center recently collaborated with the ZCE to create their own Dish Kit program, catered specifically toward MINCO groups! Reach out to DC Community Engagement Fellows (CEFs), Nat Montoya-Barnes (nrm4), or Firas Shennib (fas1) for information on how to reserve DC Dish Kits.
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Williams College’s capital building projects include both new construction and renovation. Capital building projects are undertaken with the expectation that the lifespan of buildings will be between fifty and a hundred years, if not more.
One way to reuse building materials is to repurpose the whole building, and the College has an affinity for doing so, especially those that have played an important role in its history or are embedded in its cultural identity. One example is the current Class of 1966 Environmental Center, a Living Building Challenge petal certified building that fuses new construction on the west side with a historic structure, most recently called Kellogg House, which was the home of the first four college presidents. Another example is the Davis Center, also pursuing LBC petal certification, which is repurposing and renovating Rice House due in large part to the building's history around Black student activism.
In addition to repurposing buildings themselves, the college works to salvage building materials from construction and demolition whenever possible. Salvaging building materials aligns with goals in the college’s Zero Waste Action Plan to create a more circular campus and divert materials from landfills for reuse or recycling whenever possible - as well as the college’s Climate Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to building construction and waste management. Sometimes these salvaged materials are repurposed in another building project.
Slate recovered from the library project in the early 2010s and repurposed in the '66 Environmental Center. (Photo credit: Postyn Smith) For instance, prior to the construction of the Sawyer library in its current location in 2014, there was a building with staff offices attached to the back of Stetson Hall. That addition was demolished in order to add the new Sawyer library. The slate from that previous building was saved to be used as the accent pieces throughout the Class of ’66 Environmental Center. In 2023, old planks of wood from the Davis Center were able to be salvaged and repurposed as garden beds rather than sent to the landfill.