Once upon a time I saw a cartoon that showed a kid at someone’s door promoting the school fundraiser. The gist of it was, no one wanted to buy the product du jour. But when the kid offered to take away stuff the homeowner was trying to get rid of - - for a fee, of course - - it suddenly became the best fundraiser ever. I wish I had saved that cartoon. It was meant to be humorous but I still think it’s a brilliant concept.
I hate throwing things away knowing they’ll just go in a landfill. I find great satisfaction matchmaking my no longer needed items in my Buy Nothing Group. But there’s a sort of let down or sense of failure when nobody wants Your Thing. Case in point: two well-loved plastic cutting boards.
I can’t convince anyone to give them a new life with some kind of creative reuse and if I throw them away they will sit in a landfill forever. So they are sitting in my house instead. My house: the secondary landfill.
Bah, humbug.
The topic is on my mind this morning because of something I saw on Facebook about an ecologically friendly way to pass along unwanted stuff. Somehow I got the impression that it was a County initiative. So this morning I looked in all the places one might find announcements of County initiatives.
Zip.
I finally located a screenshot - - in my collection of eight million screenshots - - and it’s not County related whatsoever. What I saw was an advert. Here it is:
GreenDrop® is a for-profit company and registered professional fundraiser where required. We accept donations on behalf of and pay our nonprofit and charity partners for your stuff, helping them to fund programs in your community.
Why did I come away with the impression that this is a County initiative? Probably because I saw that the drop off was located at the Library and because the text is full of green, eco-friendly language. To be honest, it’s also because I was skimming and didn’t take the time to truly process what I was seeing.
If I had blithely shared something I had only a vague impression of…Well, that would be a lot like what happens on the Internet every day. Oof.
So, here’s the deal. The GreenDrop drop-off location is in Ellicott City. It looks like this:
GreenDrop is operated by Savers Value Village. That’s a link to the Wikipedia entry, which is…interesting. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
The charity that will benefit from the Howard County drop-offs is the American Red Cross.
GreenDrop certainly isn’t the only company soliciting drop-offs of your cast-offs in Howard County. It’s just the newest kid on the block. They want things that are potentially re-sale able (is that a word?) in their Value Village stores. Think new or lightly-used. They are not in any way a recycling operation.
I didn’t get any clear idea of what happens to the donated items that can’t be sold. What do you think?
If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: I was so invested in wanting to believe I was seeing some sort of Cinderella experience for unwanted stuff that I read into it positive attributes that weren’t even there. That bothers me. I think of myself as a savvy consumer. I let myself down here.
I still want to believe there’s a magic wand on that end when the magic is probably needed more on the other end: don’t bring more stuff into your house in the first place.
If you want those two cutting boards or have ideas for their creative reuse, let me know.
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