Waste at Wilson: The Importance of the Free Store
Sophie Aguilar | March 24, 2026
The Free Store at Warren Wilson College (WWC), Swannanoa, N.C., on March. 17, 2026. (Emma Taylor McCallum/Echo)
At Warren Wilson College (WWC), there is a free store on campus near the garden that houses clothes and other miscellaneous items that people donate. This free resource is open to students and community members.
The free store started at WWC in the 1990s. Its goal is to try to eliminate as much trash as possible by utilizing recycling. In dorm buildings, there are donation bins where students can place clothes, textbooks, art supplies or other items that they no longer need. These items are then placed in the free store to find a new home.
Fae Elkin is the Sustainability and Resilience fellow and crew supervisor. They have a passion for fiber arts and worries about fast fashion’s effect on the climate and circular economies, so it felt fitting for them to work with the free store.
“Diverting whatever we can from the trash is important,” Elkin said. “It’s also a lesson in being mindful of what you spend your money on and how much of your money is going towards things that have a very fleeting dopamine response. It really teaches you quality over quantity.”
The Free Store provides a place for people to donate commonly purchased items for college, such as mattress toppers and kitchen utensils, that other students may not be able to afford, while maintaining sustainability by ensuring these items are not put in landfills.
There is also a sense of connection in knowing that an item that is donated can come from a fellow student. It is not an uncommon occurrence to recognize an article of clothing on a peer because you once owned it. It is given a whole new life, and the cycle will continue many times over.
While Elkin is the main staff member who works with the free store, they work closely with many students, including Aurora Gilley, a junior who has a close history with the free store.
“It’s facilitating community in this really interesting way that I adore,” Gilley said. “Your clothing is being passed to other people, or any item, and there’s a really interesting intimacy about that. You pick up an article of clothing at the free store and it smells like someone else, and it’s got someone else’s stains on it sometimes.”
The Free Store also gives students a way of expressing their creativity. Many students will upcycle items they have found in the Free Store, adding their own personality to a previously loved item. The Free Store is working closely with local artists to begin hosting workshops to teach students how to mend clothes or bring color to new clothes through embroidery.
“Sustaining student creativity and imagination is important and rooted in the Free Store and CORE in general,” Elkin said. “Having spaces where makers can really just explore different materials and different types of tools is really sustainable to student life on campus.”
As a part of the WWC Work Day, the Free Store will have multiple projects, including a general Free Store clean-up and a project that focuses on cleaning and revamping the area outside of the Free Store building. The goal is to make the space more family-friendly and draw in outside guests, along with making it a hub of resilience for students.
“I want to see kids and their parents and the interaction between the Free Store and land,” Gilley said. “So often throughout the process of trying to decide what to do with the Free Store, I’ve seen the college try and make a separation between material sustainability and land sustainability, but those things go together intrinsically.”
The Free Store is a commonly used resource on the WWC campus, but it needs more support to continue its sustainability goals. The Free Store is looking for volunteers to help and show loyalty to it and its causes. On Friday, April 10, in the CORE warehouse, there will be a “trash-ion” show event. This is for crews, clubs and individual students to showcase articles of clothing, accessories and other items that they have upcycled. Every Friday leading up to the event, there will be different events and workshops to provide space for students to work on their projects.