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While shopping for dorm room supplies, you probably will consider picking up some plastic storage containers for school. But you may be wondering why they are so ubiquitous at container stores this time of year. Why are they an especially good fit for college students? Here are just a few reasons.

1. You can customize them to express your personality.

To start with, you can decorate storage bins, and you can do it quickly and easily with minimal skills or supplies. All you really need is some kind of fancy paper to tape to the inside of clear plastic totes with lids. This also means that as you discover yourself and your personality changes, and with it, your aesthetic, you can easily redecorate your plastic bins to suit your new style.

2. They fit perfectly under your bed.

Another great thing about plastic bins is that they are easy to fit under your dorm room bed. This is true regardless of how high you can raise your bed off the floor. There are wide, shallow plastic containers which you can use if your bed is low to the ground, or you can stack up a whole set of plastic boxes under a bed which is higher up.

Your under-the-bed space is probably going to be one of the largest continuous spaces available in your dorm, so you might as well make the best possible use of it.

3. You can repurpose them as you need to.

You are not going to get dorm room organization right the first time—that is almost a guarantee. You will bring too much or too little, you will choose the wrong layout, or so forth.

There is a good chance you will actually buy more supplies than you end up needing—including more plastic containers than you really need. In any case, you can repurpose the same plastic bins for different stuff in your dorm, or you can take them home with you during the summer and find a completely different use for them. The bottom line is that plastic containers are always useful.

4. You can carry them back and forth year after year without them wearing out.

Another benefit of plastic storage totes (over cardboard boxes for example) is that they are durable. You should avoid overloading them as they can gradually deform over time, but so long as you take good care of them, they should be in excellent shape even when you graduate. That should be true even if they are subjected to a moderate degree of wear and tear (which they will be). That also means that you will indeed be able to continue making good use of them when you are first starting out on your own after college.

Now you know a little bit more about why plastic storage containers are so popular among college students. While they are one of the most versatile organization supplies in existence, they are a particularly good fit for the life of any busy university student!