Two-year North Reading resident Bruce McArdle started a nonprofit Freecycle group to keep useful items out of landfills. The group has about 400 members in North Reading and surrounding towns.
McArdle, formerly an electrical engineer, now stays at home to care for his four-year-old twins, Jake and Jessica. He was previously a member of a freecycle group in Billerica, and once he made the move to North Reading, he decided to start his own group.
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5) Do you make use of grassroots recycling programs such as Freecycle to give away items that still have use or value but are unwanted by your family?
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Freecycle is a free online program where students can enter whatever items they want to throw away.
“The idea is, you put anything on there, not wanting anything in return, and the understanding is that the person will come to you, you don’t have to send or transport it anywhere else and it’s free,” Rankin said.
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Long-time gifters know that Craiglist’s “Free” board and the nearest chapter of Freecycle are fast and easy ways to get rid of your stuff locally, and keeping items in the community tightens your neighborhood network. Posting on Craigslist is simple, it allows for listing lots of items in one post and will usually yield quick and numerous responses. Freecycle requires a moderator to sign you up through an email account, and then you can post “offers” for your items on the local forums. For a more updated experience, try GiftFlow, which adds a social network element to the gifting process. Unlike the other sites, you create a user profile, which means you can post what you have and what you want while acquiring a user history; this helps when you are meeting a stranger for the handoff.
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By reusing packaging you can utilize what you have purchased. Reuse glass jars to hold leftovers, beans, art supplies, etc. Reuse pet food bags rather than plastic grocery bags to hold your animal’s excrement. Reuse shoe boxes to store items. Put a notice on Freecycle listing items you no longer need or can be reused by others. Save waxed liners from cereal boxes to hold produce at the grocery rather than plastic bags.
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MIDLAND – Local residents will have a chance to save items from going to the landfill while picking up useful – and free – stuff next weekend.
Georgian College’s Robbert Hartog Midland campus will host the third Freecycle Trunk Exchange on May 12 from 9-11 a.m.
The event is like a giant garage sale, but all items are free. No money, no trades and no bartering.
A similar event in October of last year saw more than 200 people contribute furniture, toys, home décor items and more.
Freecycle is a non-profit organization with a mission to reduce waste, save precious resources, and ease the burden on landfills. For more information, visit www.freecycle.org.
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I ended up offering up five via Freecycle.org. of which I gave away two. I did make it a point to greet the freecyclers face to face which I don’t normally do when giving other things away like old clothes and plant starts or whatever. It was my first interesting encounter of the day.
Two lovely ladies turned up on my doorstep and were very excited to get books. They also wanted to give me some. Not Book Night books, just books that they had. I didn’t need any of the books they had so they asked me how they could give them away. I did not know I was becoming an expert on book giving, these were my first two.
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Reduce, reuse, recycle. The three-word slogan is omnipresent enough to be a cliché, but a group of expats have reprocessed it into something snappier: ReReRe.
The name applies to a “freecycling” event-planning organization and a website launched in Oct. 2010 by a group of European Union-funded volunteers working for NGOs in Prague: Jane Harding from the United Kingdom, Cigdem Cevrim from Turkey, Daria Samokhvalova from Russia and Csilla Barkász from Romania. After a strong first year, ReReRe is confronted with a dualism many volunteer organizations face.
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Freecycle
Freecycle is a worldwide movement made up of individual community groups across the globe where people can come together to give (and get) stuff for free. The idea is to reduce the amount of waste we produce by matching and connecting people who are throwing away goods with others who might have a use for them. The first UK Freecycle group was set up in London in October 2003 and today there are 540 groups spread across the country.
Listing cost: Listings are absolutely free and come through to subscribers on group emails.
What you pay: Nothing at all. If any money is exchanged alarm bells should ring because Freecycle is a not for profit charity.
Postage: No postage is paid as users are required to pick up items they desire in their local area.
Photos: Most listings do not have photos and if they do they certainly aren’t paid for!
Payment system: Absolutely no money is involved just postings of items and responses from people interested in the community.
Verdict: The only downside is that you don’t make any money, but you do get to get rid of unwanted items that may not sell well on an auction site like eBay (old tvs, bedding, top soil) for free rather than shelling out money to dispose of your junk.
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Use Freecycle. People throw no end of stuff away and usually the only cost to you is the time and petrol involved in picking it up. In a similar vein, there are a good many second hand and charity shops where you can buy perfectly good second-hand items at a fraction of the cost of new – and do some good for the world at the same time.
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