Valentino sneakers that retail for $980. A Tovala toaster oven, originally $390. A Clear Home Design Lucite table, which would have cost $899 — except in this case, it was free.

Lena Geller found those items, and many others, in the trash room of her apartment building in Durham, North Carolina, after scores of Duke University students had moved out at the end of the spring semester.

“It feels wrong for this much stuff to have been thrown out,” Geller wrote in an article for INDY Week, where she’s a staff writer. She kept a spreadsheet of the roughly 70 items she found in the trash, estimating, after doing some research, that they originally retailed for $6,600 in total.

“I’ve had a few friends text me after reading the piece, like, ‘We should put together some kind of business plan,’ ” Geller, 26, said in an interview. “It does feel like most of the stuff that I got was just sitting there. I do think there’s a lot of money to be made.”

Every year, as graduation season ends, many departing students throw away or simply abandon expensive household items and luxury goods instead of donating them or taking them home. Local residents and scavengers are stepping in, rescuing items to reuse or sell, then touting their finds on social media.

“The stuff college kids waste is crazy,” a TikTok user with the handle @bethany taylorr posted last month. Her 27-second video of rummaging through the trash bin at an unidentified college and rescuing household items has been viewed nearly 4 million times.

Such social media posts can serve as both advertisements and how-to guides.

“The whole point of this is to get the stuff out of the landfill and have someone who can use it have it,” said Megan Godinez, whose TikTok account, Megan TheDDMvp, has nearly 500,000 followers. Godinez said there was a difference between foraging on college campuses and in the trash bins behind the outlets of retail giants like Williams Sonoma or Home Depot. “College stuff is home stuff that you use — cleaning products, toilet paper, paper towels, a ton of Tide Pods and dish soap,” she said. “They’re extremely useful.”

Carla Manlapaz, 62, also finds plenty of household items when she searches through discarded items at the college near where she lives in north central Texas (she did not want to reveal the name of the college for fear that school officials would crack down). She also found a Fender guitar, which she said she is hoping to sell on Facebook Marketplace for $200. She sells other items on sites like Etsy or Poshmark.

“It’s very exhilarating when you see all this good stuff that you can either make a little money on or use or donate to someone else,” Manlapaz said. “It’s a thrill. I mean, I’m 62, and I’m retired. Doesn’t take that much to amuse me.”

In recent years, many colleges have adopted what Scott Galloway, a podcaster and marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has called “the posture of luxury brands,” with lavish housing and gyms fit for pro athletes. Some say such amenities inflate costs while doing nothing for education.

College move-out season adds a twist because students need to clear out quickly. Many discover that in the previous nine months, they’ve accrued far too many goods to store or bring home.