NEW TO YOU
NOTICE
Freecycle your stuff
by Frank Tankard
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION/BECKA CREMEI
In the song "Highway 61 Revisited," Bob Dylan asks, "I got 40 red-white-and-blue shoe strings and 1,000 telephones that don't ring. Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
Bob, you can Freecycle them. You don't even need to take your stuff down to Highway 61.
Freecycle:free + recycle.As in,
"Susie is a member of Freecycle."
Or, "Hate to break it to ya,Timmy,
but Ma Freecycled your baseball cards when you moved out of the house."
The national Freecycle movement began in Tucson, Ariz., in May 2003 when a man noticed a lot of good stuff was being thrown away. This man, Deron Beal, was working with a non-profit organization that helped local businesses recycle.
He wanted this stuff to go to use, so he set up an e-mail group with 30 or 40 people, where he sent messages when he got stuff, and people would message back when they wanted it.
Wildfirel Turned out lots of people had lots of junk.Freecycle grew and spread to other cities and towns, and less than a year later a KU employee started a Freecycle group in Lawrence, and ba-da-bing, now your freakin' grandma knows about it.
(At least one KU student's does, and the grandma,Lawrence resident Kendall Simmons, was looking for a graphic calculator for her freshman granddaughter, Alix Rieman of Topeka)
People have received above-ground pools on Freecycle. And cars. And couches. And boxes, barbed-wire, flower seeds. You name it, Dick's getting rid of it, and Jane wants it.
A message at the top of the Lawrence Freecycle site, www lifeinlawrence.com, proclaims: "it's kinda like a dumpster living on the internet!"
If Freecycle is a dumpster, some can't keep their noses out of the stench. Jason Cole, Lawrence graduate student, checks it about every day.
Others practically live off it. Ryan McCarty,Grand Rapids,Mich., graduate student, and his wife, Nicole, live in an apartment half furnished by Freecycle. They had to carry their kitchen table several blocks uphill on 11th Street and their filing cabinets were infested with spiders and filth that took two hours to hose off, but Ryan says he doesn't mind.
Shala London, assistant director of the KU Center for Economic Education started Lawrence Freecycle in January 2004. She was taking time off of work to have her first child, when she heard about Freecycle and thought it would be cool if Lawrence had a group.
So she asked the moderators of Kansas City Freecycle how they did it and set up a Web site and a Yahoo listserve. It doesn't take a computer whiz to start a group, which is part of why the program has grown so fast.
There are now 1,700 Lawrence Freecycle users. This
means that when someone posts an offer, it goes quickly.
"We've gotten rid of lamps, shelving units, the whole nine yards," says Tim Dennehy, a Lawrence Freecycle member and KU Network & Telecommunications Services network engineer. "It doesn't even last 24 hours and it's gone."
Freecycle users have also pitched in for people in need, like when McCarty and his wife gave away a used TV and some dolls to a woman who said she couldn't afford Christmas gifts for her kids.
Sometimes, the response has
been immediate. Last October, fire destroyed a 76-unit building of Boardwalk Apartments, killing three people, injuring 20 and displacing 80 residents on the 500 block of Fireside Drive.
Model Richinda Brower Topeka freshman reaches into a dumpster to retrieve a lamp.
At 6:15 a.m., five hours after the fire started, a Freecycle user asked for help for a friend who had two little girls and lost everything in the fire. Three days later, she posted a thank you message.
"There's a great deal of satisfaction from giving away something you neither need nor want to someone who can use it." London says.
The Freecycle motto is
"changing the world one gift at a time." But mostly, Freecycle users are just people trying to keep their stuff out of the landfill. Or get rid of 132 half-burned candles, like Maureen Warren, Garden City graduate student, did after she used them at her wedding reception.
So, Bob, you still got all those shoe strings and broken telephones? Because I know some folks who'll take 'em off your hands. Free of charge.
09. 07.2006 JAYPLAY <07
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