I do like to read La Vie Verte.... a guide to what's green in France.
Today I read Cheap, cheerful and green holiday gift ideas....
Fight the dross that fills up newsmagazines in doctors’ waiting rooms by donating money or your old digital cameras and laptops to International Reporting Project, which provides opportunities to U.S. journalists to cover international issues that have been neglected in the media. I stumbled upon this recently while reading an article in Business Week about the land grab in Africa, and thinking to myself, hmm this doesn’t seem like the usual Businessweek fare.
If you are in the USA and would like to help get some more real news into the lives of the rest of us, please think about donating your equipment to these people. I, for one, would very much appreciate it!
So I went to that website and found this.....
Donate Equipment
Another way to support the IRP program and our Fellows is through the donation of equipment. We are always looking for: Digital Cameras, Digital Video Cameras, Computers, Laptops, Software, Flat-Panel LCD Monitors, etc. Please send an email describing the piece of equipment you would like to donate to irp@jhu.edu.
And for those of you who live in France, there is this new recycling website ... La Premier Reseau Social de Recycleurs. I don't know why they are so behind in France with EVERYTHING online and why they don't use freecycle much and people don't use eBay and there is no junk to find....I checked out Freecycle in Perigueux and the last message was in 2007! But some of them are active.... like the Montpellier Freecycle.
Unlike here in Adelaide where you can drive across a couple of suburbs and be sure to find a hard rubbish collection going on where the experienced eye can scan the foot paths and collect enough stuff to make a chook shed or an old clothesline to make shade for summer herbs or whatever project you have in mind! When the boys were little we got a slippery-dip and a blackboard and more recently a laser printer.... a little temperamental but almost brand new and still going strong after 5 years! Dare I admit it but last week we found an as new, beautiful queen size futon mattress, still in its plastic wrapping.... now we just need a base......I'd better look on Freecycle myself....
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6 comments:
Nowhere is perfect, but we've found France way ahead of Wales with recycling collections, recycling plastics and so on. Also, anyone can go to the local déchetterie (dump) and pick up stuff that others have dumped - we've found boxes of unused tiles, lots of stone for the garden walls and so on.... And there are the excellent Emmaus projects dotted around France (our nearest is about 15 km away), where homeless men are housed and work to restore and resell furniture. There's still a long way to go, but it's going in the right direction.
Oh, I forgot to say as well that in the villages here in France there's much more of an informal recycling system, so that if you don't want something you offer it to someone else who will - eg. windows to make a cold frame. That's why we almost never buy anything for the garden!
You are lucky then because although the recycling depots are fabulous in SW France, there does not seem to be any way to swap "stuff" and people take everything to the recycling depots.... and you can't take it out! I don't know of a tip there because rubbish is taken to the Mairie bins and the rest is taken to the recycling depots.
Ask around next time you're there, Kate, because I'm sure there must be a déchetterie where people take building rubbish and other stuff that isn't collected. Every village has one. At ours, if something looks specially good, the workers leave it outside their shed so everyone can see it and take it if they want it. Surely this can't be just the laid-back Mediterranean attitude?
Thanks for the tip....oh, no pun intended! I will certainly try harder to find such a thing. That laid-back Mediterranean attitude is very also very Australian!
Greatt blog you have
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