Freecycle is a no-brainer, isn’t it? It’s so clearly makes sense. It proves the underlying principle that one man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
This word ‘community’ is banded about a lot at the moment. It has meaning on a local level but, because of the Internet, it has a meaning on a wider level too. The Net brings people together.
I’m still laughing at the absurdity of what happened when I offered to give away my son’s old Peg Perego stroller for free on the Marin Freecycle site. All I wanted to do was to be good to the environment by not throwing the thing away but the exchange ended up being as dramatic as a drug bust — and a lesson in the misunderstandings that can arise with Internet communities when you trade random information online with strangers.
The crime of the century starts here ……
Freecycle is an environmentally conscious and fabulous free exchange of used goods where people can offer stuff that they don’t need any more and where people go to get things instead of buying new. A woman responded to my post that she’d like my son’s used stroller and I sent her directions to my apartment. I told her that I might not be home so I’d leave the blue stroller out along the wall of our building in front of our apartment.
A few years back, Deron Beal worked for a recycling organization in Tucson, Ariz. He’d drive an old pickup truck around to other nonprofit groups, and say, “I found this old desk or this computer. Can you guys use it? I spent [most of my] time calling or driving around,” he says.
That changed on May 1, 2003, when he sent off an e-mail to about 30 friends and a handful of nonprofit groups. Those who needed something should just e-mail everyone else. Those who had something to give away could tell the others about it, too. Freecycle.org was born.
I agree that it’s not worth trying to build a hundred-obsolete-drive array, but I strongly disagree with turning them into garbage prematurely. Sell or give away on ebay/craigslist/freecycle/whatever instead. There are lots of people who can make good use of a few end-of-life-but-still-working medium capacity drives. Just make sure you erase them thoroughly first. Realistically ‘dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda’ is plenty; to be absolutely sure give them one pass with a fast random number generator first.
If you want magnets you can take them from failed drives.
Melbourne households have embraced recycling but not so much is known about how we tackle the arguably more important area of reuse. What do we do with items we no longer need or cannot store? Scouring hard-rubbish bins has become a suburban ritual in those areas that still have regular collections; Lane says many respondents did not realise that if their contribution was not taken by neighbours it would end up in landfill. She believes there is a latent community willingness to dispose of items more responsibly but that many do not know how to do this.
The survey asked: how did you dispose of used household goods in the past two years? Ninety-five per cent reported reusing materials such as plastic bags in the home; 82% used hard-rubbish collections; 74% gave items to friends and relatives; 73% gave to op shops; 57% used charity bins; 46% used door-knock appeals. The remainder took items to the tip, hired skips or used the internet site Freecycle which encourages people to give goods away as a means of helping others and building community (the Melbourne Freecycle website is the second most active outside North America where the concept began; only the London site is bigger).
A couple of years ago, I heard about Freecycle. I was intrigued. Freecycle is a not-for-profit community group online that focuses on keeping junk out of landfills. The basic idea is “I can’t use it. I want to find someone that can.” Like a lot of people, there have been many times I needed to get rid of something that was still very usable. Sometimes the thing I want to get rid of isn’t accepted by Goodwill or other charitable outlets. You don’t want to throw it away or haul it away-but you don’t know who might need it. Sometimes the trash seems like the only option. Enter Feecycle.
Freegans, in principle, recycle as much as possible. It is in their ethic to compost and repair broken things and use sustainable transport where possible. Freecycle.org is a site where you can find fellow Freegans advertising unwanted goods in your town. This can range from TVs to beds to children’s clothes. However, everything must be offered for free. Services such as these can help to reduce landfill and the energy wasted in the construction of new items. Cardiff has a particularly active and successful group.
But Freecycle has given me riches far beyond the material. I’ve met a saintly foster mom (and actually cried when she was told she couldn’t adopt one of the children), and several delightful junkster shut-ins who, miraculously, wanted chit-chat as much as I did. My husband secretly arranged to pick up a decade’s worth of old New Yorkers for me, surely the most romantic thing he has done since cutting little heart-shaped pork chops for me for Valentine’s Day circa 2000 (apologies to the vegans among you Freegans).
- One person’s junk … Yahoo! has coordinated a big push with Freecycle in order to encourage the reuse of all sorts of existing resources. (Incidentally, I’ve written about Freecycle before. I love their model, which plays into the garage sale mentality of one person’s junk is another person’s treasure.)
Recently I had a bed I wanted to get rid of - one that was, I felt, too good to spend the next 1,000 years rotting in landfill. So I decided to have a go at Freecycling it instead, which to my surprise threw up some interesting questions about online identity.
If you’ve not come across it before, Freecycle is a group that enables you to donate unwanted goods to the local community. There also seems to be no limit to weird and wacky items offered on Freecycle - who would have thought old video tapes or 5kg of rice could find a new home?
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