Web groups allow people to recycle, swap items, reduce waste

Sharing.

You learned that in kindergarten. Then you spent a lifetime buying stuff so you wouldn’t have to share a darn thing.

Now you can’t get in your front door. Your house looks like an episode of “Hoarders.”

To thin the clutter in her home, Bernice Hunter joined a group called Freecycle, a Web-based community formed to allow people to give away things they don’t need and receive stuff they do need, for free.

Communicating online with people in her neighborhood, Hunter, a 57-year-old technical writer in Tucker, gave away hundreds of books, a half-dozen pieces of furniture, planters, philodendron cuttings, a broken router — perhaps 1,200 items. To hear her describe it, the experience has been exhilarating.

“To clean up the bookshelves, the drawers, the closets — oh it was wonderful,” she gushes. “I used to post five or six times in a given day. A half-can of bug spray — it’s amazing that somebody is willing to take these things, but it keeps them out of the landfill.”

Hunter is part of a wave of people dedicated to reducing/reusing/recycling with an eye toward shrinking the garbage stream. The Web group, with millions of members in 85 countries, is inspired by the world of online commerce, although, in the case of Freecycle, no commerce is involved. All items on that site are given and received with no strings attached.

Mashanda Lane, 34, operates the Johns Creek Freecycle group (each group is limited to a circumscribed area, to reduce driving time and make exchanges efficient) and has extended the recycling concept into all areas of her life.

In her kitchen, under the sink, is a small lidded plastic garbage can where red worms turn her vegetable scraps to mulch. “We live in a very sophisticated neighborhood,” said the mother of three. “You wouldn’t look at our house and think we have worms in the kitchen.”

Her husband, Mike, thinks the worms are gross (the kids are divided on the topic), but the family is united in an effort to shrink their wasteful habits.

Variety of groups

Freecycle is one of many online communities that make such green market exchanges possible. The group has controls on communications between its members: none can offer compensation for items accepted; cross-posting to multiple lists is discouraged; and reselling donated items is frowned upon.

Canton resident Edith Butler, a Freecycle moderator, adheres to those strictures in her Freecycle exchanges. But she also created a similar group, called Reduce_N_Reuse, with looser rules, for those who want to be able to borrow, trade or sell items. “I really enjoy working with the people and being able to help people,” she said.

Other borrowing groups have sprung up in the past few years, including Neighborgoods.net and Sharesomesugar.com. Disregarding Benjamin Franklin’s advice, Emory University graduate Adam Berk created a community of borrowers and lenders with Neighborrow.com, which allows members to charge “rent” for items such as iPads, cameras and even automobiles. An evaluation system of experiences similar to that used by eBay customers keeps the participants honest.

Berk, 32, a former securities trader, calls this evaluation system “collective accountability,” a way, he said, to leverage the power of the Internet to encourage ethical behavior. Someone who borrows a lawn mower from a neighbor might risk burning that bridge by bringing it back broken, but he wouldn’t risk burning every bridge in the 10,000-member Neighborrow community.

A tanking economy serves to encourage borrowing, said the New Yorker, but people still like to save money, even in good times, by not buying something they can rent.

Is saving money being “green?”

“They say that I’m light green,” Berk said. “I just don’t like waste.”

Green and practical

The motivation, said Daryl Pulis, who moderates the Johns Creek Freecycle group, is to reduce the number of commodities that you buy and to use what you already have. “My dad is 96,” she said, “and with him, every bent nail was straightened out, and it was used.”

The alternative is piling more things up in landfills, said the garden expert, potentially leading to methane leaks, exploding houses and a spiral of doom. “It’s just the wrong way to be.”

Some customers hate waste. Others hate to see a beautiful dress sitting unused in a closet. A small group of women who subscribe to the blog Apracticalwedding.com decided to put their wedding dresses to good use by passing them along. For free.

“They say, ‘This dress is wasted. I wore it. It is wonderful. It is sitting in my closet,’” said blog founder Meg Keene of San Francisco. Keene puts the former and future brides — including one in Georgia —together and posts photos of the dress hand-off on her site, usually showing beaming, happy women.

For Keene, those happy encounters make her blogging efforts worthwhile.

Those warm feelings extend to others in the online green market.

“Environmental consciousness is becoming a more mainstream thing and not a granola-fringe-consumer thing,” said Keara Schwartz, founder of Sharesomesugar.com.

“It is pretty exciting; it’s a huge shift in consumer habits.”

What do I do with ... ?

Tucker resident Bernice Hunter, a Freecycle administrator, has a variety of suggestions for repurposing household items to keep them from landing in the landfill.

• Pencils: You may not like pencils once they become stubs or if the eraser is low, but the public libraries can use them.
• Trophies: DeKalb County's Tucker Recreation Center will accept your old youth sports trophies, which, be honest, are probably gathering dust. They put new plaques on them and turn them into new awards.
• Many Ace Hardware stores will accept old tools, as well as hardware such as nuts and bolts.
• Take old T-shirts, towels, sheets to your local veterinarian. They will use them for bedding for animals that are boarded overnight.
• Plastic forks and knives: "Give me a break," Hunter said. "Just wash them and use them again."
• Old keys: Many locksmiths and hardware stores will recycle old keys.
• Dryer sheets: Used dryer sheets will clean your iron; just run the iron over it on medium heat. Used dryer sheets are also useful for dusting, even after you've already used it to clean your iron.
• Empty CD cases: Your local library can use these. Call and confirm.
• Refrigerators: Georgia Power will recycle your old fridge. Go to www.georgiapower.com/energystar/refrigerators.asp

Resources

A variety of online communities offer ways to swap, borrow, rent or otherwise share resources rather than discard or buy new. Among them: