Tag Archives: landfill

Your trash may be someone else’s treasure

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Do you have something that is perfectly good but you no longer want or need, perhaps clothes your son grew out or a bookcase? Would you like to remove it from your home, make space but you have no desire to coordinate a garage sale or cart it off to a second hand store and it makes no sense to throw it away. You would rather recycle it.  On the other hand, do you need something, a wheelbarrow, maybe fireplace equipment; it doesn’t have to be new, just functional. Perhaps Freecycle TM is for you.  FreecycleTM is a worldwide online network where you can post notices about items you’d like to give away and find things that you need. The only requirement is that the transfer of an item from one person to another has to be FREE.

Through FreecycleTM, you can help the environment by diverting useful items from landfills while also helping members of your local community. Everybody has something they want to get rid of, so instead of dragging it out to the curb and filling up the landfills, wouldn’t it be better to connect with someone who probably wants what you have?

The Freecycle Network is made up of over 5,000 groups with over 9,000,000 members, in 85 countries around the world. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. As a result, the network is currently keeping over 500 tons a day out of landfills! This amounts to five times the height of Mt. Everest in the past year alone when stacked in garbage trucks!

It is a wonderful tool for redistribution and I have been utilizing the network for almost ten years in towns from coast to coast. I have found it particularly helpful before and after a move. When we were preparing to move from California back to New York, I would list an item and sometimes within an hour, I would have at least 5 people requesting the item. It was so easy to purge, even on the day of the move when a large item simply would not fit into the moving Pod. On the other hand, when we moved into a new location and needed something, someone in our new community had the item we needed.

I know you must be wondering about safety. Common sense is always important. Most of the time when picking up an item, it is left by a mailbox or garage. I rarely ever meet the people that I make an exchange with, but thank you notes are often left. Some people do prefer to meet in a central location. After, almost ten years of exchange, I am happy to say no problems have ever occurred during an exchange. The worst issue is a no show, which is often frustrating.

Local volunteers moderate each local group. However, there are a couple of basic rules that govern all the FreecycleTM programs:

Keep it free, legal & appropriate for all ages

No offering YOURSELF or YOUR CHILDREN

Subject line of your posts should include:

  • Offer, note location
  • Taken
  • Wanted, note location
  • Received

By giving freely with no strings attached, members of The Freecycle Network help instill a sense of generosity of spirit as they strengthen local community ties and promote environmental sustainability and reuse. It’s a beautiful thing.

To sign up, simply go http://www.freecycle.org  and find your community by entering it into the search box above or by clicking on ‘Browse Groups’ above the search box.

And of course, membership is FREE!

What ways do you redistribute your unwanted items? Please share and I will continue to share.

Come on, Let’s Just Reduce

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I’ve been a long time reducer, reuser, recycler and composter. Early on, I realized that we humans are creating too much trash and are having a difficult time managing it.  I remember driving past a landfill when I was a teenager and concluded that trash should not be buried. In Florida, if you see what appears to be a hill or a mountain – it’s a mountain of trash! That is so wrong.

Furthermore, it should not be put onto a barge and floated out to sea. Remember the barge that no one wanted? In 1987, it left NY and for 112 days, it traveled 5,000 miles down to Belize and back because no one wanted the trash.

In 1997, Captain Charles Moore discovered the “Pacific Trash Vortex.” It is an area in the North-Central Pacific where tiny bits of trash, together weighing as much as 100 million tons, the size of the state of Texas had been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. There are five similar vortexes on our earth. That’s a lot of trash!

Yes, we have to live and we will generate waste, but if we look at what we actually need and how to obtain these necessary items, we are able to limit the amount of trash we create. Germany knew that too much trash was generated from unnecessary packaging; so in 1991 they passed a packaging law “Verpackungsverordnung,” that requires manufacturers to take care of the recycling or disposal of any packaging material they sell. Therefore, waste became the burden of the manufacturer not the consumer. Guess what happened? Products were produced with less packaging – BRILLIANT!!

When I moved into my first apartment after college, I started to look at my trash differently. For the first time in my life, I was living on my own and deciding what I needed and what I wanted to buy all by myself – no roommates to negotiate with.

  • My first step was to stop buying items that would generate a lot of trash – no more extra-unneeded wrappers or packages. At first, I shopped in the average grocery store. I wandered the aisles, making choices based on ingredients and then on the amount of packaging. Fruits and vegetables were less challenging to buy, as they tend to have less packaging but not always.  We are lucky in the USA as we have so many options when shopping.
  • Then, I found that I could buy items by bulk at a food co-op, enabling me to reduce packaging.  Many communities have some type of food co-op, here’s a link to find one close to you http://www.coopdirectory.org/directory.htm

At first, I would simply bring my herb jars to the co-op and fill them up. Now I buy herbs, dry fruit, grains, honey, maple syrup, vanilla, molasses, cooking oil, coffee, shampoo, conditioner and of course meat, cheese, fruit, and vegetables in bulk.  It takes planning no doubt, but if I bring my own containers and bags (which I reuse of course) I generate very little waste. Two added bonuses are that many of the bulk items tend to be less expensive (no $ going into packaging) and procured locally, so I am helping the local economy, my pocketbook, while reducing waste.

  • Farmer’s markets are an excellent way to buy in bulk, support local farmers and reduce wastes. The Eat Well Guide is a great resource; it helps locate farmers’ markets, family farms, food co-ops, restaurants, grocery stores, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, U-pick orchards and more http://www.eatwellguide.org

In 2011, a group of students and professors from Yale University found two fungi in the Amazon rainforest that can degrade and utilize the common plastic polyurethane (PUR) in anaerobic conditions (without oxygen), which may provide some relief to our waste issues.

Yes, we can recycle, reuse, bury our trash, put it on a barge, send it into space, perhaps even use fungi….but isn’t it easier to not create it in the first place? Let’s just reduce!

Do you have ways to reduce your wastes? Please share them, as I will continue to share more of my ideas with you.