Go Green with Your Local Freecycle Group

Freecycle is a great way to get rid of unwanted and unused items, or get free items that you do need or want. The main goal of Freecycle is to find a new home for people's unwanted items, to keep them from ending up in our already overflowing landfills.

Freecycle is an online community group with local chapters in almost every city in the United States and abroad. Interested people join their local online group, then can post messages for items wanted, or items they wish to give away. Before posts are published on the bulletin board, it will go through the group moderator for approval, then be posted on their groups bulletin board and sent out to group members via email. Each member can elect their choice of receiving posts, either daily, or a weekly digest, or not at all, some members prefer just to log in to the group's homepage and check out the posts there.

If anyone has the items that you are looking for, or wants the item that you are giving away, then your post will be directly replied to you by email. Your email address will be visible in your posts, but giving any further personal info on the public post is discouraged.

Once your post has been replied too, the members will contact each other and make arrangement for pick up of the item.

While Freecycle is a great way to get rid of your leftover yard sale items, clean out your closets, or receive items that you need, there are also those who fraudulently use their local Freecycle groups to get items for resale.

Weekly warnings are sent to each member from the individual group moderators re-stating the rules of etiquette, truth in description, and not to state that you are 'in desperate need of' an item to play on people's sympathy to get items. However, since this is free site, with free items, there will always be those that misuse it.

Pleas for good running cars, boats, mobile homes, and housefuls of furniture are common. Those pleas will be accompanied by tales of woe, which is against the Freecycle rules, but alas, some people ignore the rules, and somehow those pleas slip past the moderators.

My all time favorite post was by a person who asked for a casket for their final freecycle.