My local library has given me access to a lot of mustbethrifty resources. One aspect of thrift that has been cropping up in my reading is freecycling, ‘the act of giving away usable unwanted items to others instead of disposing of them in landfills’ (via Wikipedia). First conceptualised by freecycle.org in 2003, freecycling is a form of hand-me-down via online groups or forums.

A couple of months back, I signed up to the local freecycle group’s mailout in the hope of finding some old sports trophies as wedding decorations, but my first foray into freecycling was a failure: no one replied to my WANTED post, and I spent fifteen minutes every day clearing my inbox of Freecycle spam.

I continued subscribing to Freecycle, however. There was something appealing about nosing through other people’s junk. Continue reading →