photo by: Bremen Keasey

Bulk items from moving out of apartments on Louisiana Street in Lawrence.

U-Hauls lining the streets. People lugging couches and lamps. Old furniture items lying in alleys or dumpsters right by the sidewalks. Move-in dates for housing around campus are not just stressful on parents and students preparing the new digs for the upcoming fall semester; they’re the busiest time of the year for the city’s waste department.

“We need all hands on deck,” Gabriel Chavez, a solid waste supervisor with the city’s Municipal and Services Operation department, said.

With most apartment leases in the city ending in July and starting in August — and students living in residence halls at the University of Kansas moving in Aug. 22 and 23 — it’s the start of a busy stretch for the MSO division.

Chavez said this time of the year is so busy that they’ll normally “black out” time off requests because of the excess demand from more waste. The crews see a lot more bulky items they need to take care of, including sofas, tables, beds and chairs.

Colton Walter, another solid waste supervisor with MSO, said another issue that makes things tougher for the department is that the piles of stuff left outside, especially in alleys behind student housing, will often get picked through by people looking to find something salvageable.

Walter said they have seen the remains of bags ripped open by someone looking for valuables or couches someone attempted to drag away to keep as their own before giving up and leaving it. All of that makes trash collection more time consuming.

“It really does prolong the whole collection process because it makes it messier,” Walter said.

For students and families moving in, they face their own stresses, navigating the streets and alleys close to KU’s campus in U-Hauls and other rental trucks. One mom moving in her son to his first college apartment after he lived in the dorms last year said this year things were much harder. Along with needing to get much more furniture for the apartment, they also needed to wait to get their key from the landlord to enter the house.

Janie Lauberth, a senior from St. Louis majoring in environmental studies, said she was used to the moving process after living in a different apartment every year.

Lauberth said her dad was helping her out, but that doesn’t mean the whole process didn’t bring about stress each time.

“It’s always a difficult day, especially physically to have to move everything,” Lauberth said.

Though the street was clutter-free for those families moving in, that was not the case a few blocks over, where the remnants of sofas and other furniture were stuffed into dumpsters or clumped on sidewalks outside the houses.

Walter said one way the clutter can be better cleared by MSO is if people called in work orders, though he understands that certainly is not a student priority.

If the city knows who is doing some of the illegal dumpings, Chavez said the city could charge them, but that becomes much tougher during the move-in and move-out situations, especially in the alleys near many student housing areas.

Although the city is able to charge for people doing illegal dumpings, it is harder to figure out who to reach out to when it comes to student housing. Walter said that unlike some residential areas, where you could just knock on someone’s door to talk with them, it is “worlds harder” to get a hold of either students or their landlords, who often don’t live in the city.

Along with removing discarded furniture, the department has to still do regular trash pickup. Chavez said it is much better to keep all big items out of the dumpster.

“You throw a sofa in the dumpster, then no more bags can fit in the dumpster; now the trash goes on the ground, making it easier for possums or raccoons to get in it,” Chavez said.

Despite the “dramatic uptick” in materials the MSO has to take care of over the next few weeks, the workers understand this phenomenon in a college town and the challenges that come with it. Chavez noted this is a different type of waste removal than dorm move-in time, which generates less bulk trash but more regular trash.

Over the coming hectic weeks, Chavez hopes residents know the crew is hard at work as it navigates the increase in action around the town as students begin to come back.

“They have to be patient and we have to be patient as well,” Chavez said.