A word about Freecycle

It's exactly what is sounds like—a hybridization of recycle and free—and it's a bit like garage saling any time of the year from the comforts of your home. More importantly it is a community based network of people who care about getting stuff moved in to homes where it will be used, and keeping it out of the landfill. These are things we care about, too, so we joined our local Freecycle group in January. Since then we've found new homes for three boxes worth of stuff from our basement that was slated for who knows where (it failed to sell at a garage sale two years ago, and wasn't the Salvation Army's style), and have given a new home to two phones, a book shelf, a large set of holiday window clings, and, my favorite so far, a huge box of fabric, all for the grand total of zero, zilch, nada.

Being a community based network, Freecycle is different in every location and the value of your local group depends entirely on the people who make it happen. Ours is a very active place. It is run as a Yahoo group and works through group messages—each message posted is a new item either being offered or sought. One of the things I like best about Freecycle is that as a poster of an item I am completely free to choose its recipient; my stuff doesn't have to go the first responder, but can go to the person who is the most polite, seems to have the greatest need, or strikes me as the one who will enjoy the item most.

Garage sales, thrift shops, and Craig's List are a big part of the living green lifestyle—the more stuff that we can repurpose, reuse, or recycle instead of buying new, the more we will save not just in terms of our bank accounts (although that's true, too), but also in terms of materials and energy. And let's not forget how fantastic it would be to decrease our nation's dependency on material objects, too many of which come from other countries. There is a whole world of people out there who care about these principles, and you can find some of them on Freecycle.