'FreeBay' sites connect the cheap and the green

By ANDY SULLIVAN

WASHINGTON - Attention Rhode Island residents: A free washing machine is yours for the taking at the corner of Tangent and Burgess in East Providence.

It might not clean your clothes, but it could come in handy as a movie prop or ... something.

Sounds enticing? Jen Duclos hopes her notice on Free Marketwill attract an internet-savvy dumpster diver willing to cart away the unsightly appliance, which was mistakenly posted as a stove.

"It's been sitting out on the curb for like a year," Duclos said. "It just makes the neighbourhood look so ghetto, I hate it."

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but online exchanges offer free timber, refrigerators and other slightly used treasures for anybody willing to come haul them away.

These exchange sites, or "freeBays", match bargain hunters with environmentalists who don't want to see their old television end up in a landfill just yet.

A quick scan of sites like Freecycle and Craig's List can turn up feather boas in San Francisco, couches in Las Vegas and king-size beds in Houston.

Participants say items posted on the more popular exchanges are often spoken for within a day.

Jeff Kwaterski of Washington had to get rid of his rear deck as part of a recent home renovation, a task that would have required hours of disassembly and trips to the dump.

Kwaterski posted the deck on Craig's List. Within 24 hours, two engineers working on a project of their own had broken it down and carted it away.

"You just don't want to throw away good stuff," Kwaterski said. "I think it's definitely something we'll keep going back to."

Free exchanges are a great way to keep serviceable items out of the landfill, said Alex Danovich, a business manager with Eureka Recycling, which set up the exchange in Rhode Island and one serving Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Twin Cities site boasts 75,000 regular users who traded some 750 tons of material last year, he said.

Refrigerators that don't fit with a new paint scheme, aging computers and leftover landscaping materials are popular trading items, Danovich said, but participants have given away everything from scrap metal to an entire six-bedroom house.

"You can't list anything with a mother," he said. "That's pretty much the main rule."

The site is particularly popular with social-service agencies, which can furnish apartments with used furniture and kitchen appliances, he said.

Old VCRs, computer printers and other electronics can be tricky to discard properly because they contain lead, mercury and other toxins.

Electronics account for one in five items traded on the Twin Cities exchange, which keeps them out of landfills and provides a more cost-effective alternative to community drop-off events, Danovich said.

Because freeBay sites often deal with heavy or bulky items, they tend to operate on a local or regional basis.

The city of Madison, Wisconsin, operates an exchange, while Craig's List and Freecycle offer dozens of local exchanges built around towns as small as Topsham, Maine, population 9500.

Other exchanges cater to industrial users. RecycleNet touts itself as a "Nasdaq for scrap", creating markets for recyclable materials like glass, metal, rubber and paper.

FreeBays can take a while to catch on, Danovich said. The Twin Cities site has built up a solid user base since it launched in 1997. But the Rhode Island exchange, set up three months ago, lists only six items -- and they don't seem to be going anywhere.

Among them is Duclos' washer, still on the curb in East Providence since she first posted it a month ago.

"I figured it can't hurt to list it," she said. "It's pretty awful looking. It's right under a streetlight."

- REUTERS