Freecycling
Freecycling--something to think about it, because you still can't take it with you. A little revolutionary fun that could possibly put Wal-Mart out of business...who is game?
`Freecycling' Devotees Are Saving the World, One Item at a Time
BY MARGIE BOULE
c.2003 Newhouse News Service
Imagine being able to get free stuff, reform your inner pack rat, help someone in need, protect the environment and perhaps even participate in a revolution.
Sound radical? Not if you take it one free thing at a time.
That's the concept of "freecycling."
For more information go to the extended entry...
`Freecycling' Devotees Are Saving the World, One Item at a Time
BY MARGIE BOULE
c.2003 Newhouse News Service
Imagine being able to get free stuff, reform your inner pack rat, help someone in need, protect the environment and perhaps even participate in a revolution.
Sound radical? Not if you take it one free thing at a time.
That's the concept of "freecycling."
Freecycling, says its Arizona creator, Deron Beal, is "a strange creature. It's basically a listserv for people to give and get things locally for free." A listserv is a computer program that automatically distributes e-mail to everybody who signed up on a mailing list.
Freecycling works like this: You have, say, a radial arm saw sitting in your basement that you bought, thinking you'd take a carpentry class and make a dining room table. Ten years later you're still eating on a card table and realize you'll never fire up that saw.
So you send an e-mail to a local Freecycle listserv titled: "OFFERED: RADIAL ARM SAW." Sure enough, within a day or so you get an e-mail from somebody who could really use that saw. They come pick it up, and you're free to pick a new hobby.
While you're trying to decide, you might peruse the free items others have posted on the Freecycle list: Do you need a small refrigerator? A queen-size mattress? An oil tank?
Or you could request specific items you're looking for, say, bricks, a bread machine, door gates for a puppy, or a time clock.
Depending on whom you talk to, freecycling is either a handy way to clear your closets or a planet-changing economic system similar to the Native American gift-giving ceremony "potlatch."
"I see freecycle as a way not only to keep our landfills free," says devotee Albert Kaufman, "but to allow people to experience a gift-giving economy." Kaufman runs a listserv in Portland, Ore.
Freecycling is spreading fast around the planet. Just last week Freecycle listservs were begun in Tokyo and Singapore.
It all started in Tucson, Ariz., in May. Beal, who's 36, runs a small nonprofit recycling organization in Tucson. Every once in a while someone would donate a desk, or computers, "and I'd have to call all these nonprofits, asking, `Do you need a computer? We have a computer. Do you need desks?' It was a lot of work."
One day it occurred to Beal: He could start a listserv, post what was available, and save himself all those phone calls. "And then I thought, why don't we open it up to everybody?"
So he did. "The first e-mail I sent to my friends and 10 or 15 nonprofits. That was on May 1. It started picking up pretty quickly."
After a week he had 30 people signed up; within a month it was up to 60. Today more than 1,100 folks in Tucson trade a steady stream of offers of, and requests for, items as diverse as propane barbecues, old wrestling videos, a prickly pear cactus and a Hammond organ.
"There's someone out there who needs almost everything," Beal said by phone.
By midsummer in Tucson, it was clear Beal had conceived an innovative way to meet those needs. Someone sent a description of freecycle in Tucson to the Utne Reader, which put a blurb on its Web site in August and a small story in its September/October issue.
"All of a sudden we got responses from all over the place," Beal says, "from people looking for guidance, saying they wanted to do this."
One of the responses was from Kaufman, 42, in Portland. A big supporter of recycling, he liked the idea of giving people a way to "freecycle" their trash, "rather than just tossing it away."
He contacted Beal, set up a Freecycle Portland listserv, and posted the first offer himself Sept. 16: a free one-hour guitar lesson. "The second posting was just a few minutes later, and it was a car," Kaufman says.
As it has in nearly every other city, Freecycling has taken off in Portland. Someone has offered to make free videos for rock bands. Someone else requested donations of large-size dresses.
Kaufman is moderator. Actually running the listserv takes only about five minutes a day, he says. He keeps out spam and ensures the most important rule is scrupulously followed: Everything must be free. No bartering. No exchanges of money.
Kaufman thinks it could change the way people look at their possessions. Beal agrees. "People go in thinking `want, want, want,"' Beal says. "But they come out feeling, `I'm helping out. I'm part of something bigger here."'
"For some people, it's a way to get a free toaster," Kaufman says. "For others of us, it's a way to change the world."
Oct. 27, 2003
(Margie Boule is a staff writer for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. She can be contacted at marboule@aol.com.)
