I found out about The Freecycle Network a couple years ago and have been picking up free stuff all over town ever since. With Freecycle you can look through a list of things that are offered by people in your area that no longer want certain possessions anymore and you can then pick these things up from them for free. The same people you pick up from use Freecycle to post what they no longer want to keep (or need, or can handle) for some reason. They have people come to their home (or meeting spot) to take it off their hands or even just to make room in their homes. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I see listed. Don’t think it’s garbage either. One person’s trash is another’s treasure. I’ve received a fine couch that I’ve used for years and people still comment on, an old piano that all my friends can play better than me , and more healthy plants and garden equipment than I have space for. I saw a car on there once…it didn’t work, but still…a freakin’ car!
One of my favorite features is that you can subscribe to email notifications based on certain keywords you set up. For instance when I got into gardening, I set my Freecycle email notification keywords to ‘plant’, ‘pots’, ‘garden’, and ’soil’. Within the following weeks I picked up things like plants, pots, gardening equipment and more. Freecycle helped me so well that changed my keywords within two months cause I had amassed a serious collection of tools, soil, and plants and was myself running out of space. If your a pianist, try ‘piano’, ‘keyboard’, or even ‘harpsichord’. Who knows, maybe someday when you’ve forgotten about it, you’ll get an email saying that there’s a harpsichord a couple blocks down the road.
Freecycle is a non-profit group that serves the entire world with over 6,000,000 million members. Reuse and recycle other people’s things that you may love and keep landfills slightly less filled in the process. Not to mention you’ll always have a place to go when you want to give something back and get rid of something at the same time. There’s an amazing community within Freecycle. Every time I sign on, which can be frequent at times, there’s a backlog of free stuff I missed (that don’t have my keywords obviously) all within miles of my home and sometimes even on my street. It’s amazing that more people don’t know about it. Yay to free stuff for everyone!
The Freecycle Network at Freecycle.org
Ever picked up something amazing from Freecycle? Let me know in the comments. If you’re new to Freecycle, tell me how you like it. I was hooked and I know you’ll be too…just wait.
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