In our town we have to pay for garbage pick up. It's not included in our taxes. So twice a year our town has "bulk pick up day". It's a special day that everyone gets really excited about 'cause you can finally get rid of all the stuff you've been saving since the last pick up. Its treated with the same anticipation as a holiday. The broken chair you realize you're not going to fix, the role of fencing wire that's been in the garage since you moved in, all will be put out by your street curb for the town trucks to haul away for you. But before they do a cavalcade of pick up trucks and panel trucks systematically, and with army like precision, take all the interesting things leaving only the really useless, unrepairable stuff. It's a semi annual occurrence, like something out of National Geographic. Instead of our local land fill getting piles of junk, it gets recycled.

This brings me to Freecycle.org (thanks Becky). This is a grass roots nonprofit organization started with the idea that the best way to keep our landfills clean is to create a network where people who have stuff to dump can get in touch (via the web) with some one who's been looking for that exact thing. There a chapters all over the US and it's free. It's like a giant electronic swap meet.