High-Tech Freecycling

I'm a bit fanatical about not wasting things. "This is perfectly good" is a phrase I have applied to 10 year old shoes with holes in them as well as an ancient MP3 player I can no longer sync to my PC. I cannot bear to throw anything away.

But I am happy to sell-away, give-away and recycle.

Of late I've been into Freecycling. This a way to give away your used stuff by offering it to people on the local Freecycle mailing list. Likewise people on the list can make requests for items that they need.

Sometimes this works OK but sometimes people just take the piss. Loads of people asking for free Xboxes and iPods doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the thing.

Likewise, when I've offered items, it's obvious that there is an army of people sitting by their computers 24-7 waiting to call dibs on your item just so they can turn it around for resale. Half the time they don't even know what they're grabbing.

There have been a few alternative services that manage this a bit better than Freecycle (GigoIt and ChanceXchange) but they just don't have the presence or size to work in Singapore.

So I've invented my own work around. Now people interested in My Items have to Register their interest. The registration form collects entries in a Zoho database and it's much easier to ID who I want to deal with. E-mails are just messy for this kind of thing and I simply delete those who reply by e-mail showing that they haven't even bothered to read the first line of my offer ("Do not reply to this e-mail!").

Next: Buy Nothing New for One Year ... and ultimately Freeganism!

Labels: freecycle, freegan, recycle