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Saturday, March 5, 2011

Alternative to using the landfill

The article in today's Sun by Larry Carson about the cost of trash raising for the County makes it more important that alternative ways to recycle. I am always frustrated with the amount of packaging that is used in many products today. Especially when so much of it is had to get open and non recyclable. We have a great networking alternative for many household items that you maybe throwing away. It is called the Columbia Freecycle and now has over 4600 members. When I started this over 5 years ago I never realized how quickly it would grow just by word of mouth. Today over 150,000 posts of items have been made. Many of these items could easily have ended up in our landfill. Have a TV that has stopped working you just might be able to have someone come get it for free rather than taking it out to the landfill. Of course you can also get many useful items for yourself. I have received an elliptical machine, a recumbent bike and many kid items for my grandchildren. I even freecyled some wood panels that I tore out of our kitchen during some remodeling. A person that made picture frames was thrilled to get what I thought of as trash as he said he could make tens of frames out of the wood he received from me.

Isn't is about time that the County post a sign at the entrance of the landfill with the web address for the Columbia Freecycle? Is that too "out of the box" for the County folks?

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