A little More About the Freecycle Thing

Freecycle is a growing trend in both urban and rural communities. This great new bargain basement craze is one heck of a way to offset and reduce your carbon footprint. Today a friend of mine sent me invites to join two local freecycle networks and I was stunned at how fast the offers started rolling in.

As explained on their website, the freecycle folks are all about waste reduction and reusing items that have both value and worth. The rules are simple: no fee, no politics, no meanness just online postings of free useable stuff in your local area. The group is a non profit network operating nationwide with thousands of locally moderated branches for your convenience.

It’s all about lowering your personal carbon footprint. The more items that we keep out of landfills, the better off the planet. And throwing away stuff someone else may want and can use? That’s just stupid. And if like me you live in a town where the local thrift store doesn’t take furniture (they have no space) giving it away to strangers is much better than taking it to the local dump.

Freecycle seems like an honest bunch of folks, despite my husband’s reservations regarding the whole scheme. I mean really, in this day and age, people giving stuff away for free? Craziness! But the grassroots efforts across the globe to try harder to instill community, share with friends and neighbors and promote responsible discarding of unwanted items are all results of the growing green movement.

So here’s what you do. Write a small description of the item you want to give away on the forum post page. Include your street address and the location of the goods. I’ve learned that just for safety’s sake, most people leave stuff on their porch or sidewalk near their home rather than invite people inside. Better safe than sorry. Once the item has been picked up, you post to the forum again, letting everyone else know not to bother coming out.

A surprisingly simple and effective system. But here comes the uber green part. You can also ask for specific items that you need, cannot afford or don’t want to pay for. The one I came across today was a couple looking for lidded glass jars to make jelly with. They didn’t want fancy jelly jars just glass jars they could reuse. They soon posted a thank you after receiving more jars than they could ever use. And just think, rather than ending up in the trash, the jars were repurposed. How cool is that?

This footprint lowering, waster reducing, recycling phenomenon is bound to have its critics. Green socialism perhaps? The slippery slope to organic communism? Whatever, call it what you will. Personally, it seems to be a great way to reduce waste, help people out and reduce costs during these difficult economic times.

I can’t wait to see if I can go and freecycle the apples off a neighbors tree. Free apple pie is the best kind of apple pie. Talk about shopping locally.