Hobart and William Smith Colleges

23 February 2026 • Alums • Athletics HWS Alumni-Led Reuse Effort Finds Value in Eaton Hall By Mary Stone

Before Eaton Hall's demolition, ReUse Systems stepped in to keep tables, shelves and other remnants out of the landfills.

Early this year, the double doors of Eaton Hall swung open as more than 15 Hobart basketball players filed into the nearly empty halls. Players ducked under doorframes and fell in step with members of ReUse Systems Inc. for a different kind of workout: hauling lab tables, metal stools, shelving units, cabinets, countertops, projectors, whiteboards and anything else salvageable out of the soon-to-be-demolished science building. (Eaton Hall demolition began in mid-February to make way for construction of the Fish Center for the Sciences.)

For Jan Regan, one of the organization’s founding leaders, the team’s help changed the pace of the 5-day project that removed close to 480 items from Eaton. “The basketball team gave us our most productive day,” Regan says. “That’s when we were able to move the most material out of the building.”

Drawers rattled on dollies as the team moved down corridors that generations of HWS students used to get to their biology and aquatic science labs. What many viewed as remnants, HWS alumnus and ReUse Systems founding member Jacob Fox ’16 recognized as opportunity.

Equipment Removal from Eaton Hall

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Eaton Hall became ReUse Systems’ first major project.

“In our world, this isn’t just about keeping stuff out of a hole in the ground,” Fox says. “Every table we reuse means the energy and carbon that went into the steel and the manufacturing keeps working for us. That’s upcycling, not downcycling.”

Regan says the Eaton Hall project also carries significance beyond reuse alone.

Because the salvage work was carried out in partnership with a nonprofit reuse organization, allowing materials to be removed and reused, Regan says, can help HWS earn points toward its goal of achieving LEED Silver certification or higher for the new Fish Center.

The items removed from Eaton Hall currently are being stored at the Geneva Enterprise Development Canter, Regan says, through the support of the Geneva Industrial Development Agency. 

Fox helped launch ReUse Systems with Regan and others in 2024. The waste-reduction organization connects people and institutions across Ontario County with opportunities to reuse building materials, furnishings and other goods.

The Eaton Hall project, he says, is exactly the type of moment the organization was created to seize.

“Anyone who’s ever moved out of a house knows — you get to a point where you just start throwing everything in the dumpster,” Fox says. “In large buildings, that can mean perfectly usable materials that never get a second chance.”

Fox says his education at Hobart and William Smith shaped the way he approaches waste reduction.

“I think HWS taught me a lot of systems thinking,” he says. “I was able to apply that to an industry that still operates very inefficiently.”

Regan notes that the organization itself grew out of broader sustainability work in the Town of Geneva. She credits Town Supervisor Mark Venuti with helping initiate the effort and pushing the community to respond proactively as regional landfill capacity tightens.

“He really started kicking this off,” Regan says. “In light of the upcoming landfill closure, the community needed to plan what we were going to do with our waste and how to reduce it.”

Beyond salvaging materials, ReUse Systems is working to grow into a workforce-development organization that offers training, living-wage jobs and repair and reuse programs, along with a permanent retail and warehouse space of roughly 15,000 square feet. For meetings, the team is currently headquartered downtown in space donated by HWS at the Bozzuto Center for Entrepreneurship.

Longer term, Fox hopes the organization will expand into full-scale deconstruction — carefully dismantling buildings so fixtures, casework and materials can be reused rather than discarded.

“There’s huge demand already,” Fox says. “The challenge isn’t creating a market. It’s building the systems to do something smarter with what we’ve been throwing away.”

For Regan, Eaton Hall demonstrated how quickly progress can happen when institutional partners and volunteers align.

Top: Hobart basketball remove materials out of Eaton Hall.