Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Picture a vast junk box floating in the ether, spilling over with an inflatable raft, a clothesline, a 12-inch radial-arm saw, an Elmo sandbox, 18 post-mastectomy bras, three squashes, two rats, a rat cage and all sorts of other battered treasures, all flanked by a giant sign: FREE STUFF.
"We all have something that we don't want to admit that we're not using and will never use," says Deron Beal, 36, who started the very first Freecycle list in May 2003 in Tucson, Ariz., where he works part time for a nonprofit recycling group called Rise. Beal created the list as a way to hook other nonprofits up with the used couches, computers, office chairs, desks and file folders that the businesses he worked with no longer needed. Since then, the Tucson list has grown beyond the nonprofit world to include more than 1,600 members, and the concept has been adopted in more than 82 cities, including Kansas City, Orlando, Washington, Bangalore and Tokyo, with new lists now starting at the rate of 10 per week.
The ground rules are simple: Posts to the list indicate whether an item is an "offer" or "wanted" in the subject line, and there's no cash, barter or trade allowed. While offloading free stuff on the Net certainly isn't new to local community sites, Freecycle has spawned a mini-movement devoted to giving. Some people may get on the lists solely in search of freebies, but they soon start feeling the itch to part with their own extra filing cabinets, hearing aids and plasterboard.
Sometimes the goal of wasting-not is taken to extremes. Bryan Cordova, 24, a recycling education coordinator for a nonprofit environmental organization who has given away cacti, towels and a twin bed on the Tucson list, recently found himself mailing a dog food coupon to a fellow freecycler. "It was a coupon for a free bag of dog food," he says. "It wasn't a brand that I was planning on purchasing for my dog. It was just a few dollars' value, but why let it go to waste?"
Unlike donating to a charity such as Goodwill, freecycling puts the giver in touch with the people who will be benefiting from his or her largesse: "You deal with them directly so you know that the person who is getting what you're giving away is somebody who needs it," says Anna Harrison Griessel, a 39-year-old video and film producer who lives in Green Valley, Ariz. Griessel has given away five bags of clothes, a Microsoft keyboard, piano books and cookbooks on the Tucson list.
There's the added incentive that it takes less effort to shoot an e-mail out offering a single item than mustering up the energy to clean out a whole closet to justify a trip to the Salvation Army. And freecyclers argue that they do reach the needy who can't afford to log on for freebies via the many nonprofits that frequent the lists.
Once you start giving things away on the list and meeting the people who want them, the game of giving can become an end in itself. "It's just sort of fun now to walk through my house one room at a time and see what I can get rid of," says Griessel.
"Paying it forward" and "karma" pervade the way freecyclers think about their lists. "People are always talking about doing the right thing and helping your fellow man and saving the environment," says Martha Blake, 36, a stay-at-home mother in White Salmon, Wash., who is the moderator for the Columbia Gorge Freecycle list, which has 203 members. "We all have really good intentions and have all these dreams of things we want to do to help, but we always seem to be stuck in our everyday things and never get to those. This is kind of handed to them on a silver platter: This is your chance." She received an old bookshelf from the list, which she converted into a ferret playground, and gave away a fish and a fish tank to a local 7-year-old boy whose mother didn't want him to have a more labor-intensive animal as his first pet.
The spread of freecycling, however eco-friendly a way it may be to relieve chronic overconsumption, does raise the not-so-ideal prospect of perpetual junk shuffling -- as soon as you get rid of your clutter, you take on someone else's. But maybe that will turn out to be the Internet's greatest gift -- in the future, there will be no junk, because every last thing will have found its way to a person who truly needs and appreciates it.
