It's like a scene from an old western. A lone, dusty shape stands by the side of the road, ignored by passers-by. Its fate is decided as a carriage pulls up beside it. In this modern, urban version of the story, an old filing cabinet is no hero as it's picked up in a garbage truck and consigned to landfill, to be buried and forgotten.
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But it didn't have to be an unhappy ending. An increasing number of Australians are catching on to a global phenomenon in which used goods are happily picked up by resourceful pioneers.
Freecycle, a global online network for local communities, is a grassroots economy based on giving and chucking away - all with no mention of money. Thousands of Sydneysiders are signing up, turning their trash into other people's treasure. Key to the philosophy is keeping things out of landfill as long as someone, somewhere, can still use them.
"Our garage had become a storage unit for stuff we couldn't bear to throw away but no one would buy," says 49-year-old Melodie Neal. "A car-washing brush that you stick on the end of a hose, Wellington boots, twin-tub, fluorescent light fittings, a plastic leaf rake and a spud bar - it was a veritable Bunnings warehouse in my back garden."
Neal is in the final throes of sorting through junk in her garage. She follows each Saturday morning clean-out with an email to the online community of givers and receivers, using the web-based notice board to purge her life of unused stuff. Recently, a university student who had just moved out of home caught a bus to Neal's inner-city home armed with an empty plastic bag to pick up a lamp. She drove him home, the car boot stuffed with old curtains, tools and garbage bags full of sheets that don't fit her bed.
From Balmain to Parramatta, Newtown to La Perouse, a burgeoning community of online recyclers is scouring lists of school uniforms and second-hand toys, rabbit hutches, buffet tables and aloe vera plants.
One freecycler recently posted three black metal dining chairs, which will "need a clean as are under the house collecting dust". Another wrote: "Our kids are finally out of their high chairs, would you like them?"
Some users are coming from a tree-hugger perspective, shunning the notion of landfill. For others, it's a rescue net now they're feeling the financial pinch. People furnish their apartments, new parents pick up bundles of baby blankets and others find that essential part for the vintage car they're fixing up.
Freecycle is pulling in more than 2000 new members a day internationally. Each month the Sydney West group boasts more than 6000 members and up to 1000 new posts. In 2005, this average was closer to 30. The site itself estimates that users had given away more than 5 million items by the end of last year.
Ruth Lane, a sociologist from the School of Global Studies, Social Sciences and Planning at RMIT University in Victoria, recently conducted a study on the waste of second-hand goods in 306 Melbourne households. She found that the most common means to dispose of unwanted household goods are through kerbside recycling bins and council hard rubbish collections. She also found that people are more likely to give things away than sell them.
Far from there being a stigma around wearing or taking "seconds", there is a new zeitgeist at work. "There is a renewed interest in second-hand. Vintage clothes are fashionable and people have their composts. It's all about non-waste," Lane says.
It is a reaction to "mega-consumerism", says Stephen Juan, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney. "Yes, Australians are big consumers and almost everything we do is supporting our very luxurious, lavish and comfortable lifestyles. And then you have people reacting against that."
But as we face the economic downturn and the environment is percolating into the public consciousness, Juan predicts we'll be seeing more recycling, more hand-me-downs and definitely more freecycling.
For 46-year-old Tim Ramacciotti, freecycling has been based on the concept that you don't need to destroy something just so it can be replaced by something new. He uses freecycle to get rid of the sort of things we think we'll love and then almost never use, like the bulky deep-fat fryer. And he has used the site to pick up an alarm clock, bedside tables and several lamps.
While the cleansing element makes Neal, for one, feel virtuous, the truly gratifying part is finding someone else who can use it.
"It's really important that people think they are contributing to the solving of problems," says Juan. He likens the freecycle network to "acts of guerrilla kindness".
Juan says this is what being in a community is about, and networks like Freecycle nurture it. And that, if nothing else, makes for a happy ending.
www.freecycle.org.au
