By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Stuff. It’s piling up in our garage. Stealing space in our bathroom closet. Lurking in the attic. We modern homo sapiens gather gadgets, what-nots, mementos and widgets like our forebears gathered nuts.

Except that the ancestors ate the nuts. We’re just nuts about our stuff.

Now it’s time to get crazy about sharing that stuff, spreading the wealth, so our burnished treasures can enjoy a second life – just not in our living room!

America’s Freecycle is one way to give it away, it’s been hooking up people with junk to jettison with those who are tickled to get it for six years now, growing from a cottage industry in Tucson to 6.5 million members worldwide — despite the near certainty that your 1989 La-z-boy, your fake ficus and definitely your plaque with the fish singing the Macarena all have limited appeal (even with a price tag of zero).

Overseas, there’s yet another comer in this wasteland market. It’s called “My Skip.com” and it bills itself as the “world’s most secure, easy-to-use and free website dedicated to promoting the reuse of unwanted goods [oxymoron unintended].” This week it hopes to raise its profile, and advocate for recycling used goods, with a 24-hour “Celebrity Throwaway” in which items donated by celebrities such as Sheryl Crow, Ricky Gervais, Shilpa Shetty and Sir David Attenborough will be available for free at My Skip. The online event starts at 9 a.m. GMT on Tuesday.

More than 100 celebs are taking part (see the impressive list), with their hand-me-downs being offered one at a time for free every hour somewhere on the site, but anonymously, so you’ll have to search for them.
This is the awareness-raising part, showing newcomers the stuff available for free, and hopefully causing them to conclude that reused items can be a viable part of their daily life.

My Skip is a product of the United Kingdom, and therefore it deals in “rubbish” instead of “trash”, or rather near-rubbish. Like Freecycle, it is an online meeting place for people offering up their once cherished gee-gaws for free. It shares Freecycle’s mission: to reduce the refuse, or rubbish, heading to the landfill by slowing down the human consumption cycle and extending the life of things.

The difference is that My Skip.com is a for-profit concern, whereas Freecycle is a non-profit, which gets funding from corporate sponsors like Waste Management and from on-site advertising. Freecycle’s motto is “Think Globally, Recycle Locally” and it puts that into action by working through hundreds of local member groups. Expenses for the entire operation are low, under $150,000.

MySkip.com, which launched in March 2008, works a bit differently, engaging the public directly through its newly designed central site where customers select the action they want to take “Rummage” or “Dump”.

Hoping to become the ultimate “free trade” business, it will generate income by offering premium services and has just launched new technology that will help people find what they’re seeking through alerts when those items become available online. Hopeful on-loaders will pay a small fee to get “SMS alerts” when compatible off-loads are posted. This eHarmony of junk approach could bring more people into the business of free-trading.

“We want to bring reuse into the mainstream. How we do this is by appealing to people’s needs such as ease-of-use, security and convenience while trying to make the whole online reuse process cool,” says CEO Gary Cope.

“People will embrace reuse if they see benefits, whether personal or by contributing to a good cause, in this case, the charitable act of helping someone out, Cope said.

“I also believe that promoting the reuse of unwanted goods will bring social, environmental and economic benefits. It is why MySkip is committed to working with businesses, non-profit organizations, governments – at local and national levels – to raise awareness of reuse as a sustainable alternative to recycling,” he said.

“No one person or company or government can solve our environmental problems – we need to work together but the first step is to build awareness around the issue.” Aside from reducing landfill waste, My Skip wants to address poverty issues and to that end, has set up the My Skip Charitable Trust, to address poverty issues.

About that celebrity auction, the reason the items are being kept anonymous — you won’t actually know if the glove you bought belonged to Boy George — is so they don’t become tomorrow’s fast buck on eBay.

And that name, My Skip. For Americans who don’t know, a “skip” is a term for a dumpster. Happy diving.

(Photo credit: My Skip’s CEO Gary Cope and May Al-Karooni, director of operations, with some of the donated items for the celebrity auction.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

We’re too familiar with the downsides of the holiday season. Bags of new things come into the house and get hidden in already-full closets and drawers. Boxes of decorations come out of their hiding places, muscling their way into your living space. Wrapping paper and ribbons multiply like guppies, scissors and tape go missing, cookies come out of the oven and the doorbell rings. When it’s all over, we work to find places for the new stuff, stash the decorations again and vow to make next year different.

Guess what. It’s next year.

What if – indulge us here, for a moment – what if you could simplify first this year, getting rid of things you don’t use, recycling them where they’ll be appreciated? What if you could make space now, and begin the New Year with closets that don’t look like they’ve been through a natural disaster?

You can. And you’ll feel so good, because one computer, one stuffed animal or one pair of old athletic shoes can change a life.

“You’ve heard the story about the young person tossing starfish back into the ocean when they washed up on shore and were in danger of dying in the hot sun, right?” asked Barry Cranmer, president of the Share the Technology computer recycling project. “Someone asks why she was bothering because there were so many and she wouldn’t be able to rescue them all, so it wouldn’t really make any difference.

“As she tosses another back into the water, she says, ‘it will make a difference to this one.’ “

Take a quick tour of your closets, the basement, the garage. Are there books, tools, sports equipment you no longer need or use? Old towels, a wedding dress, a wheelbarrow?

Let’s save some starfish.

The kids’ room

Kendra Robins knows her territory. The founder of Project Night Night, a program that gives books, stuffed animals and blankets to homeless children, learned when she had her son that not all toys find their forever home the first time around.

Children “find their favorites, and those get super-loved,” she said. “The other ones sit on a shelf, looking cute. Things are either tattered beyond recognition or nearly pristine.”

This year, in its fourth year of operation, Project Night Night will distribute more than 25,000 tote bags to kids who don’t have homes. Each bag will include a brand new blanket, at least one children’s book, and at least one gently used stuffed animal, most of which have been donated from kids’ rooms just like yours.

“Shelters use them for welcome gifts. All of this is new and very scary to the child, and some of the shelters are not that nice. A lot of kids are frightened, and having a stuffed animal helps,” Robins said. Books are important because homeless kids often have lower academic achievements than others. And the blankets give them something new, all their own, to cuddle for security.

Project Night Night has drop-off locations in Phoenix, Arizona, the Bay Area in California and in Solon, Ohio, and five mailing addresses around the country. You can also work with the organization to keep your donations in your own community. Project Night Night sells its Tote Bags online for $3.50; you commit to packing them and donating them to a shelter of your own choosing or one of the 300 shelters with which they already have affiliations.