Saturday, November 28, 2009

Things They Should Invent: a freecycle in every apartment building

There are 200ish apartments in the typical highrise building. It's quite possible that's enough households for a viable freecycle. All buildings should have this. If you have something that's perfectly useful but you just don't need it, you can put it in a central location. And if you need something and wouldn't mind getting it used, you can look in this central location. It would be more convenient than conventional freecycling because you wouldn't have to find a specific taker or arrange a time and place to transfer the item, you could just drop it off in the central location. Perhaps after things have been in the freecycle for a certain amount of time without any takers, property management could donate them to some charity or arrange for a freecycle with a wider audience. (Perhaps this could be part of Environment Days?)

As I've blogged about before, things that are technically useful but their owner has no use for them tend to end up in the landfill. And I believe under current regulations (at least in Toronto) property owners are financially responsible for the amount of garbage produced by their building. It would be very much to their advantage to make this possible.

1 comment:

laura k said...

It's a great idea. We could adapt it to suburban locations, through community centres. It would be slightly less convenient (as the surburbs are) but I think it would still work.