I live in Boston and literally just spend the better part of my day trying to make a donation. I packed everything up and dragged my stuff downstairs to the concierge desk in my building, walked 15 minutes to my parking garage to get my car, drove back to my building on a busy street and double parked to quickly load up the trunk. Then I drove what should have been a 10 minute drive to the Kenmore Square Goodwill but turned into a solid 30 min because of all the traffic from BU's graduation ceremony. When I got there, all the parking spots were blocked off and police were forcing traffic to keep flowing. I went around the block several times looking for parking before deciding it was pointless. I quickly Googled the next closest Goodwill store, which is in Jamica Plain, and decided to go there instead. There's no graduation in Jamaica Plain today but the Goodwill store there is also on the main road with very little parking...
You can always donate to Boomerangs with a little more ease. They're a few buildings away from the Goodwill on Centre and you can pull into their back parking lot while you are dropping off. Cool store, too.
As a Midwestern suburbanite, I don't think I understand this service. When it comes to trash removal, the city already comes around once per week and collects whatever I put out there. The cost of this is baked into my city taxes and can't be opted out of so far as I know. There may be some technical limit as to how much they'll take at once, but I've never hit it. They even come around and take big stuff, like couches and mattresses, a few times per year. Is this type of service not common throughout the US?
This is an interesting idea for donatable goods like clothes, but I lose the write off and I'm not sure waiting around for a pick-up is really more convenient than just driving the stuff to a drop off location myself.
The only real advantage I see here is getting rid of stuff that's hard to dispose of: car batteries (you know, cause I'm always throwing those away), poisonous or flammable liquids, medical waste (which I don't think I've ever had), etc... but I can't believe that is profitable cargo for them to haul away at $5/bag.
What am I missing here? Am I just the wrong demographic for this?
I feel similar in some ways. I live in an urban apartment building, we have a "recycle room" where I can leave anything I can produce and it magically goes away. Having said that, when I rented in a different part of the city we had a very small bin and shared it with the apartment downstairs. The bin would often fill up and I'd find myself holding onto trash because I had no room left for it and no time to drive to the dump. In that case $5 would have felt like a good deal!
I can't speak to the US, but here in Ireland the city does no such thing, so we would love to have this service! Creators thereof, please consider expanding over here. You'd get a lot of customers at double or quadruple your current price.
I just returned home from hauling most of my clothing to the local Goodwill. On a related note, I look forward to seeing more people wearing startup/conference t-shirts around NYC, since they comprised the lion's share of my wardrobe...
I've been researching these services for the past few weeks since I've committed myself to liquidating most of my belongings (I live in a small apartment with no closets -- thanks New York! -- and was inspired by this blog post: http://www.raptitude.com/2011/01/i-dont-want-stuff-any-more-...), and would prefer to see them in the hands of friends and those in need rather than a landfill.
Does anyone have recommendations for where/how to donate more valuable items? For example, I want to donate an expensive drone I never use, but would prefer to see it go to a classroom/after-school program. Thinking I'll search DonorsChoose.org and offer things to teachers, but is there another service?
I've got a propane torch, a fire extinguisher, various household cleaning supplies, and about 100 lb of ceramic tile to get rid of. And I have some 3 mil "contractor bags" than can handle more weight than I can carry.
My current plan is to drive the hazardous waste to recology. If someone could do it for me it'd be nice, but I'm not sure that's even legal. Still working out the tile thing. Not sure Habitat would want it. I've also got a bunch of paint, but I know where to take that.
Some cities have a household hazardous waste disposal location where one can drop off used chemicals, paint, etc. They will separate stuff that can be reused and properly dispose of the rest. The one in our city, we just backup our car and they take out the stuff while you sit in the car and complete the paperwork and show an id.
You can also dump in sand or kitty litter. You just need to make sure that when they run the compactor in the truck it doesn't explode paint everywhere.
I pay something like $50 a month for trash collection services, or around $12 a week. That includes yard waste and recycling.
If I can fit my trash and recycling into two bags per week and find something else to do with my yard waste, I'll save money by using GoodAndTidy for weekly trash pickup.
I like their website and the idea, but it seems like a service that may have trouble becoming profitable based on their $5/bag fees.
You are right, I think it's the only way to expand this kind of service, and the reason why they require the bags to fit in a sedan.
We can even imagine an uberpop for thrash with untrained people driving and destroying their car with thrash, and picking up hazardous wastes such as asbestos and everything that should be highly regulated instead.
If there is room for improvement the solution is always an uber for X because people have cars and people need money.
To be a little bit more constructive, there are already lots of convenient ways to get rid of stuff we don't want anymore, most of them requiring some time investment. But that's not so bad since owning and getting rid of stuff should come at a price. A price we generally dont pay when buying stuff (the recycling tax for electric stuff in Europe is a joke for example).
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I'm struggling to find a privacy policy, is there one? This could be the cynic in me, but I feel there is more to learn from my unwanted items than almost any other data source (aside from my email?). Gaining information about people from what they discard is possibly a great business model, but I think the situation should be made clear in a privacy policy.
My first thought from "properly dispose of, we don't want it in landfills" was, this is for hazardous waste -- you know, that box of old paint cans and dead SLA batteries that you know your city has a plan for, if only you could be bothered to figure it out. If not, maybe the website should make that more clear.
"Currently in the San Francisco Bay Area."
Does not pick up in Palo Alto, Mountain View or Foster City. That's the just few addresses I've tried. A service area map would be helpful.
Where I last lived, there was at least one charity that had free pickup by truck. Not on demand exactly, but they could take anything useful if it was boxed- or furniture. You could leave your stuff on the porch and they would shift it for you.
This seems strictly worse and very expensive if you want to get rid of any significant amount of stuff.
This one takes none-useful items too. The reason I want to get rid of the stuff is that it is not useful (unless you really want an old CRT tv or a case of broken computers, I guess).
They just updated their text and dropped San Francisco from the list of supported areas. Currently they are only in Berkeley.
I would use this service. I easily have couple bag of not-quite-trash that wants to be dealt with. But really, what are they going to do with an old Nokia cellphone charger? Or a 24" LCD monitor with DVI and VGA input but the HDMI input is broken. Or slightly damaged clothes with rivets and zippers I keep meaning to repair but have never gotten around it, so might as well throw out.
For $5, I can't imagine I'll get any sort of post-processing report about what they got out of my crap or what they managed to do with it.
Hell, I've got a bunch of crap that I keep meaning to put up for sale on ebay/craigslist that I never get to. I doubt I'm alone in that regard.
In Mountain View, and likely elsewhere in the Bay Area, charitable organizations make the rounds once a month to basically do the same. They provide the bags, collect them, and presumably sell what they can for cash. As for batteries and other hazardous materials, there's a protocol to have the city pick them up for no charge. I've never had a problem getting rid of stuff and feeling like I'm doing it responsibly. It's hard to understand what value this adds beyond immediacy.
At least with the services I already take advantage of, it's all done in batches and my contribution is low compared to the overall haul. This is on-demand, so it's likely not as efficient.
Any links you can share to these services? Will have a bunch of stuff to give away soon and I'm not familiar with the various organizations in MV that help with this.
I was looking for extra information so I entered my email into the field. Figured they'd sign me up for a mailing list like what all the sites out there do.
I was surprised to see it say "Thanks, expect an email from us first thing in the morning!"
I can't find a way to cancel the request. Hopefully it'll be in the email. I understand the need for rapid on-boarding but this was a bit of a surprise.
I would use this. I have a bunch of old batteries, light bulbs, and random machine parts thats I been meaning to recycle but never get around to it. If these guys would properly recycle those things for me, I would pay more than $5 because I am trying to be conscious about what I put in the landfill.
The District of Columbia gives each household a couple of large-item pickups every year. (Large item example--old storm windows, say 4 feet by 2.5.) Latex paint, as someone remarks, can be allowed to dry out and dumped with regular garbage. The Fort Totten transfer station accepts nastier stuff--solvents, oil-based paint, electronics--one Saturday every month. And with Goodwill on South Dakota Ave. NE and Community Forklift in Hyattsville one can get get rid of pretty much anything still usable.
Disposing items properly costs money. Donating items doesn't. So the incentive for them is to "donate" as much trash as possible. Then non-profit org will have to deal with it.
Sorry, I just don't like non-profits being treated as a free dumping site.
I hear your concern and I hope they have no intention of treating non-profits as a free dumping site. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and not just assume the worst of them.
As my wife and I are currently going through Mari Kondo's http://tidyingup.com/ process, this would be great to have in London.
Recycling is generally great here, but there are certain things that are actually quite valuable, but are just way too much hassle to get rid of one-by-one.
I'm not fully sure why someone would use this. Is it for donating stuff, or garbage disposal?
For my unwanted items, I donate them via https://givebackbox.com/ - which gives you a pre-paid UPS shipping label and lets you ship to Goodwill for free.
I'm moving and have recently sold and donated a three bedroom house full of stuff rather than haul it.
Maybe this a specifically urban need? Up here in my small mountain town (< 4000 pop.), Goodwill, Hospice, Hospitality House (homeless shelter), and Habitat for Humanity all pick-up free as do the thrift stores.
Same options exist in Columbus, Ohio. You just have to work around their schedule, they only come to certain parts of town on certain days of the week/month.
This seems good. I like that this has the potential to expand the total pool of donated items and help reallocate resources to people who need them, while also helping people clear out their homes too.
