Freecyle

While I haven't indulged about this subject on here, one thing I do care about a lot and try to do as much of as I can is recycling, reducing, and reusing. Today's post comes under reusing, in an awesome way.

Freecycle is a trading website (for Americans, think Craigslist, for Aussies, think the Quokka) with the main idea being to keep things out of the landfill and to a new good home. Most of the time, things are offered for free if you come pick them up. And the reason I'm talking about this on here: a lot of those items are exercise equipment.

Someone buys an elliptical/cross-trainer, tries to make themselves use it for a month, and then it sits in their garage as an extra clothesline at best, rusts in the shed at worst. So on Freecycle, people often put this things up for grabs. Now it's your turn to take it and hope your motivation to continue using it is greater than the previous owner (which I'm sure it is).

While Freecycle is a single website, and it does serve in USA and Oz, each area that it serves is moderated by local people, with different rules. For example, in the Perth area, the Melville group has open access, while the Western Suburbs (City of Stirling) require you to get a Yahoo group ID (free of course) to access their listings. All free, just sometimes you have to take an extra step to get there. And it would be well worth it: just today, someone was indeed offering up a cross trainer for anyone who could come retrieve it.