The Joy of Freecycling
When my wife and I moved our family to the North Carolina mountains several years ago with the aim to simplify our lives, we were thrilled to find a home with plenty of storage space to the tune of a full garage, six closets and two walk-in storage areas in the loft. It sure brought home to us what a prosperous country we live in to have so much room to store so much stuff. The downside is that it’s been a real challenge to maintain our simple living approach to life when our home is constantly filling up with stuff.
Maybe it’s that my wife and I have recessive hoarding genes. After all, hardly a time goes by when Ann drives the 45 miles down the mountain to visit her mother that she doesn’t return with a backseat or trunkload of stuff her mother no longer wants. Then there’s all the stuff we’ve acquired from two rental properties we own that’s left behind whenever a tenant moves out, leaving behind…you guessed it, more stuff.
And it’s not that some of this stuff isn’t good, usable stuff. It often is very good stuff — toys, clothes, furniture, household appliances, dishes, pots and pans, even a five-burner stainless steel grill. But for whatever reason, these items didn’t make the grade when it was time for the tenants to move on. So we were left to figure out what to do with it all.
Lucky for us we discovered freecycling shortly after one of our tenants vacated the premises leaving behind a massive amount of trash. But you know what they say — “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I think this principle is at the heart of the freecycling movement that’s quietly taking the recycling world by storm.
The concept is simple. As it says on their website: “[Freecycle] is 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.” It sure has been a godsend for us. I remember that first time we discovered Freecycling. Our tenant had been renting our small, three-bedroom house for a little over three years, but when the economy tanked, he lost his job. When he and his daughter moved out, they left behind a massive amount of stuff but not all of it was trash.
For example, we collected large trash bags of children’s clothes of all different sizes. My wife washed ten laundry loads, then folded and organized them according to size. We then offered the clothes on Freecycle. They were scooped up by several families who expressed their gratitude with notes and emails back to us. The same was true for the many different toys, kitchenware, and several pieces of still usable furniture. We have given away TVs, couches, clothes, tables, shoes, makeup, shampoo, luggage, all perfectly useable stuff that stayed out of the landfill. All of it found new homes through Freecycle.
We started recycling so much stuff through Freecycle that we had to set up a special “Freecycle table” next to our garage so people who’d requested the items we posted on our local Freecycle email list could pick them up at their convenience. Suddenly, we became very popular with people in our small mountain community.
But freecycling works both ways. We have often posted requests on Freecycle before purchasing something to see if anyone had what we were looking for. Often within a matter of a day or two, we’d have someone offering to help us out. My daughter found a great pair of rhinestone shoes that she needed for her upcoming prom. Then when it was time for her to start setting up her own household, she received her first set of dishes, a bed frame, and headboard all through Freecycle. Some of the other items we’ve received were plants for our garden, microwave dishes, curtain rods and brand new pillow stuffing my wife made into pillows for our sofa. We even received a new carpet leftover from a new installation that we cut up and used for entryway mats and a rug in our guest bedroom.
One of the best things about freecycling is that by pulling together in their local communities, people have kept tons of perfectly good, usable stuff out of landfills while at the same time helping out their neighbors. Now that’s what I call a win-win-win scenario.
Note: To find a Freecycle group near you go to www.freecycle.org/
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W. Bradford Swift has enjoyed a combo career as a writer and life coach for over thirty years and now coaches aspiring authors to write that someday, one day book TODAY. http://wbradfordswift.com/writing-coach/
