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Are you unsure what the easiest option is to find or donate reused items? Well now there’s a map and article to explain all your options 🙂
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Index:
- Food Banks, Real Junk Food Projects & Food Not Bombs Events
- Reuse Centres
- Free Item Gifting Organisations
- Free Item Gifting Facebook Groups
- Repair Cafes
- How you can help build up reuse groups
- Similar Resources
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Food Banks, Real Junk Food Projects & Food Not Bombs Events
If you know of large quantities of food you or someone else can’t use that’s about to go past it’s best before date, consider taking it down to your local Food Bank, Real Junk Food Project or Food Not Bombs event, so that it can be parcled out or cooked up and served out in decilious ways for free, cheap or on a pay as you feel basis.
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Reuse Centres
Ideally every town would have one reuse warehouse where every item was meticulously organized and easy to browse through. Unfortunately charity shops often throw out as much as they take in for not having the room to display it all. So, if you’re donating items, in most cases and for the time being, using free item gifting websites is still your best bet at finding the person who was looking for just that item and making sure your item isn’t going to waste.
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Free Item Gifting Organisations
Freegle and Freecycle are two easy websites to use where you can make item offer or wanted posts. Some benefits to the website are you can sort posts by just offers or just wanted posts. Posts have titles so you can quickly see what item the person is offering/requesting and how far away they are. Plus moderators can see logs of user engagement so they can discourage people who only collect to sell on.
As well there’s Trashnothing.com where you can search for posts within a set distance from where you live, though you do still have to join the Freegle or Freecycle group you want to post in or in order to respond to posts.
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Free Item Gifting Facebook Groups
Same idea as above, only often less rules. Can be good for villages who all know each other anyway, so don’t need a moderator checking every post.
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Repair Cafes
“Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.
Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.
There are over 1.500 Repair Cafés worldwide. Visit one in your area or start one yourself! See also the house rules we use at the Repair Café.”
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Free or cheap item UK search engines
- Gum Tree
- Preloved
- ENVIROMATE – Construction materials (give, sell and buy)
- GLOBECHAIN – Corporate Reuse (London centric mainly office furniture)
- WARP-IT – Corporate reuse (NHS Scotland, lots of councils, unis and charities use it)
- Freely Wheely
- Free Ads
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How you can help build up reuse groups
Hopefully this map and article will serve as a quick resource for locating just the right centre or platform you want to use. Maybe give it a share so others can benefit too.
As well you can put up a poster on a community noticeboard letting people know about free item gifting websites. Or you can even help out your local food not bombs group by designing a cool looking poster for them, advertising the time and day they will be serving food.
Finally you can volunteer on the ground or as an online moderator. And maybe create a pinned post letting people know all the reuse options in their area.
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Similar Resources
- UK Travel Master List of Resources; Free/cheap things to do and campaigns to help.
- List of UK campaign groups & how to keep their information updated.
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Activist Journeys 
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