Spring cleaning with Freecycle

Nicola & Pete plus daughters Lola, now 9 and Nell, now 7, spent last year exploring Britain in a carbon-light manner. Our spring 2008 challenge is to give up waste from 24 March to 24 April. Most posts are by Nicola (as it was her silly idea). This is how it’s going:

Recently we've had to find ways to squeeze more boxes and books (see heap in the pic edited by me) into our house which has forced me to do a bit of spring cleaning. I feel just as Mole in Wind in the Willows found - spring cleaning is fun until you can find something better to do. And that's where Freecycle comes in, a whole on line community that are willing to take all sorts of stuff from unwanted fish tanks to a bag of scrap material. We've used it to find pots, paint, plants etc but like it best for the ability to find a new home for objects we love but are on the transfer list.

In a few weeks time our family is going to try and give up waste for a month, but even without this as an incentive, Freecycle is the best way I know of making sure unwanted things don't end up as landfill where they remain for 100s of years (or more). Better still people come to your door to collect rather than you having to make one of those day-shrinking journeys to the municipal recycling centre/dump.