Jeff Allmon is tired of Lawrence’s streets looking like a landfill during the last week of July.

So he’s recruiting Kansas University students to scout the city for furniture and other items being hauled to the curb by renters whose leases are expiring Wednesday.

“People are getting rid of a lot of usable things,” Allmon said. “Students are creating a problem  putting the junk out  and we’d like to see students out there to clean up their mess.”

Allmon, community affairs director for KU Student Senate, and about 10 volunteers plan to hit the city’s streets Wednesday in a moving van. They’ll be searching for sofas, lamps, chairs and tables, “anything that could be usable, (but) people don’t want it because they don’t have room or they just don’t want it anymore,” Allmon said.

Allmon’s group won’t be alone. It’s a Lawrence tradition for scavengers to scour alleys and curbs in student neighborhoods this time of year, seeking furniture, electronics, appliances and other refuse of the collegiate life.

The Student Senate group will hit eight apartment complexes and two neighborhoods  Overland in northwest Lawrence and Oread adjacent to campus.

Plans call for setting an event to redistribute the items to other students, but no date or location has been set. Leftover items could be given to nonprofit agencies, Allmon said.

City officials, who will collect nearly twice as much waste in each of the next three weeks as in a typical week, applauded the effort, which Allmon hopes will become an annual event.

“I think that’s always helpful,” said Bob Yoos, solid waste division manager. “Reusing items is wonderful. It’s amazing how many useful items are left behind.”

Mollie Mangerich, who supervises the city’s waste reduction and recycling division, said the effort was a creative approach to the annual tradition of searching for discarded freebies.

“One person’s trash can be another person’s treasure,” Mangerich said. “There’s a great activity for scavenging this time of the year, and I’m all for that.”

In the past, the city has advocated movers taking recyclable items to such agencies as:

 Disabled American Veterans, 1601 W. 23rd St.

 Goodwill, 2200 W. 31st St.

 Penn House, 1035 Penn.

 Plymouth Thrift Shop, 905 Tenn.

 Salvation Army, 1818 Mass.; Social Service League Store, 905 R.I.; and St. John’s Rummage House, 1246 Ky.

For more information about the Student Senate recycling effort, contact Allmon at 864-3710.

“A lot of it will be victim of Dumpster-diving anyway,” he said. “This is a more organized way of doing it.”