by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

There comes a time when you have no other choice but to chuck out that once-valued doodad you've been holding on to in distant hopes that it might somehow re-acquire its charm or usefulness. And therein lies the dilemma: jettisoning a perfectly good and usable item into the garbage seems a shockingly vulgar slap in the face of the Earth gods.

There are various ways to try to be part of the solution rather than part of the pollution. "I used to put things out in the downstairs lobby when living in an apartment in the Plateau, everything from books to clothes to furniture," says 33-year-old Two Mountains resident Catherine Doe. "They would all go within minutes sometimes. It was very easy on the environment but against the fire code, according to the building's management. Nevertheless, other people eventually joined in and the pickings were sometimes very good. But now that we are living in a house on a quiet street in the suburbs, leaving things at the curb doesn't cut it. There's not enough traffic, and wealthier or pickier neighbours means stuff doesn't get taken."

So Doe signed on to a freecycle Internet discussion forum - accessible through www.freecycle.org - formed in March, whose sole raison d'être is to see one man's junk become another man's treasure, gratis, and her conscience is relieved. "I'm really concerned about landfills," she says. "When I see the garbage truck, I feel sad. It's a huge problem and I'm absolutely sure that landfills are crammed with perfectly good items that somebody else could use, if only we could find that person."

Landfill alternative

The concept is simple: if you have an item you want get rid of, announce it on the board and wait for a response, and then arrange to hand it over. The only rule is that everything must be free, appropriate for all ages and legal, according to the man who launched the local site, programmer Christian Boutin, 29. His environmental consciousness sprouted after moving to Anjou from Abitibi four years ago. "One of the main goals is to reduce how much we consume and to avoid throwing out things that can still be useful," he says. "Just because your lamp no longer matches your sofa doesn't mean it's no longer good. I'd like to stop things going into landfills."

Boutin confesses that he's hardly a pioneer. Indeed, Montreal is just one of 1,153 other cities that have freecycling sites, according to www.freecycling.org, the granddaddy site that set the freecycle movement rolling. The concept popped into the head of Tuscon, Arizona's Deron Beal, who has expressed surprised at the popularity of the concept: according to the Web site, it now sees 328,716 people exchanging 14 tons a day of goods just a year after he launched the concept online May 1, 2003. As of last week, 689 members have signed onto the local Yahoogroup.

TVs and boxsprings

So far Boutin has given away an old boxspring, an electronic agenda and computer software to people he met up with, and who subsequently thanked him for his generosity. "The concept of freecycle is that it builds a community of people, and we know the person we can give things to," he says. "Giving something away is more personal than just dumping it on the street."

So far the hottest freebie given away in these parts was a 27-inch TV. "The donor said he was giving it away because he just bought a flat-screen TV," says Boutin. "He received dozens of offers to pick it up. It was pretty surreal."

Sometimes it's something other than generosity or environmental concerns that motivates givers, he says. "Often it's to relieve space constraints. Not everybody lives in a warehouse-sized home. You get cramped by your stuff in these two-and-a-halves, and there's a cleanup that must be done."

Another participant in the local freecycle group, who calls herself Maud, says she tries to help when others write posts requesting items they need. "People feel good when they can help," she says. "There are those who aren't afraid of asking for help, and there's usually somebody there to offer it. When you ask somebody, ‘Can you do me a favour?' the other will almost always immediately reply ‘Yes.' There's a pleasure in being useful. It's a delight."