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I'm about to give away my first belonging as part of the Freecyle community. It's an old ghetto blaster that's collecting dust in my bedroom, and to my surprise there were plenty of takers for it, including a woman who had just dropped and broken the one she was planning to give to her teenage children. To quote recent commentor on this site Ian Kemmish there's a warm fuzzy feeling in both getting rid of something unwanted and helping out someone who needs your item. Surely this is transferable to large scale swapping of materials , products etc?
There are quite a few sites out there that are doing just this. One such site, called Salvomie, was highlighted by our first celebrity searcher on the Building website, Andrew Kinsey from Bovis lend Lease. A quick perusal of this indicates not a great take up of the service.
What appears to work from my limited experience of Freecycle is that groups are run locally. I think general campaigning groups are of this view about how to get a message across to the general public as well. So I was pretty impressed to see a new site this morning called Why Waste which covers the Yorkshire and Humber region. There appears quite a buzz of activity on the site, which points to the local model being more realistic and effective. It does appear to encourage a sense of community as well as achieving waste reductions.
Hi, A couple of useful links, but may I add a very key point.
Any website that freecycles is doing it from person to person. With (just) the UK at 70m people that is a lot of potential exchanges. The two others that you posted look very specialist and may more be described as business to business (albeit many are home owners rebuilding their home, therefore the amount of activity on either will be very, very much less. That said on activity levels, in the b2b kind of exchange the value of any transaction (if a value can be put on a freecycling kind of exchange) would be so much higher.
Posted by: Andy Swarbrick | 31 October 2007 at 03:25 PM
I am not sure I understand Andy's point. Does this mean the value of the B2B sites is higher? Or does this relate to activity levels?
We put our old TV on Freecycle. Within an hour a woman whose three kids had been driving her up the wall for the last day or two had picked it up. Definitely left a warm and fuzzy feeling, I'm not sure you can put a value on that transaction?
Posted by: Matthew | 31 October 2007 at 04:30 PM
I think Andy's point is that when you get into bulk stocks of materials or products there may have to be more of a transaction involved rather than just handing the stuff over. Perhaps he can help on this one.
Posted by: Phil Clark | 31 October 2007 at 04:49 PM