Give a little

• Rosanne Bersten
• 23 October 2008
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

It’s a dream that goes beyond barter: you don’t hand someone your work in exchange for something of equal value; rather you simply hand them your effort and sit back satisfied, knowing you’ve done good deeds and trusting that karma or the law of averages will mean your good deed is repaid, either by someday receiving a valuable item or more likely by looking up something in Wikipedia and benefiting from an entirely unrelated type of work. Part of this idea was noted in the 2000 movie Pay It Forward but it’s been around a lot longer than that.

In 1986, a small group of people started a festival called Burning Man on a beach in California. More than 20 years later, this week-long extravaganza in the Nevada desert creates a temporary city of 50,000 people. One of the most striking things about this city is that – after the citizens have paid their $300-plus entry fee – there is no money exchanged inside its borders. Instead, everybody brings everything they need for the whole week and lives by exchanging gifts with the other festival citizens.

Growing social capital

According to Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, the difference between a market and a gift economy is that the former is based on scarcity while the latter is based on abundance. And he says a gift economy fosters what Robert Putnam called ‘social capital’, that is, it forms connections between people.

The gifts that are given on the Burning Man playa range from handmade necklaces to fresh oysters on ice (yes, in the middle of the desert) to large-scale art installations.

Deron Beal, founder of Freecycle, notes that giving – not just charity – has a long tradition.

“In Berkeley, California there was a telephone pole which everyone knew,” he says. “If you wanted to give something away you just put it underneath that pole and they called it the Giving Pole.”

Residents of inner-Sydney suburbs like Newtown and Surry Hills often take advantage of similar, less formal arrangements for giving away household items.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the ideal is a world without money. Is that even possible? Some believe capitalism has had its day. We now have too much ‘stuff’ in the world and we can stop now.

Freegans, for example, aim to live without money at all. They ‘dumpster dive’ for food, clothing and other goods; they walk and bicycle rather than spend money on transport they see as ecologically disastrous; they indulge in ‘urban foraging’ for the almost-new rejects of this overly padded society. They have ‘freemeets’ and fair days called ‘really, really free markets’ (to highlight the inequalities of the so-called ‘free market’ of capitalism) where everything is given away.

Market corrections

That dream might take a while, but in the meantime, organisations like Freecycle have taken the idea to an organised, global level.

“Capital markets have a bad time of measuring the environmental impact of our items just being thrown away rather than being reused,” says Beal. “Currently there is no number being placed on how much CO2 is in the environment as far as the monetary damage being done there.

“I like to think that the ultimate goal of Freecycle is to complement the capital markets and capital economy with a gift economy that enables reduction in impact on the environment while capturing things that still have functional reuse rather than monetary use.”

William McDonough, a designer, architect and co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, goes so far as to call waste a design flaw.

“If everyone were to consume the way [Americans] do we would need five planets to provide all the raw materials and that’s just not sustainable,” says Beal. “At some point we will have to start rethinking how we are doing things. Once we are able to start producing things by reusing materials and not using materials that permanently degrade the environment we will start thinking in cycles of production and reuse rather than a linear model of extraction from the environment to production to consumption to disposal or waste of the item in landfills.”

Riding the Freecycle

Deron Beal, 41, started Freecycle in Tucson, Arizona after his job with a recycling non-profit kept turning up items that weren’t recyclable but needed homes. Now, the organisation has more than 5.3 million members in more than 85 countries and has just topped 100,000 members in Australia.

“I would go out with the recycling crews and occasionally see an old desk or computer or whatever sitting next to the bin we were picking up,” he says.

“We filled up an entire warehouse full of non-recyclable but good stuff. It just took off from there. I sent out the first email on 1 May 2003 and it went to about 30 or 40 friends and a handful of non-profits. Within a month we had 600-800 members which ironically at the time I thought was much too large to succeed.

“Then we got an article in a national magazine here called Utne Reader and we suddenly had probably 15 or 20 cities applying to join all at once. We knew it was coming so we set up the website to  instruct them how to join.

“People joined for the recycling benefit and to keep good stuff out of landfills,” he says. “The second benefit was totally unanticipated: community building. Unlike putting something on the kerb where it just disappears, you actually get to pick who receives your item. Maybe it is a single mother or someone who is going off to college or a local non-profit organisation, it is up to you. Eventually you meet that person face to face when they pick the item up from you.”

The Freecycle model has been very successfully replicated by non-profit organisations set up in times of natural disasters.

“During Hurricane Katrina, people pulled together to help each other using Freecycle; the beauty is you don’t get a bunch of winter coats for Hurricane Katrina but rather one person asks for exactly what they need and another person can give them exactly what they are asking for,” Beal explains.

Free can be expensive

Despite the name, Freecycle the organisation has a range of costs and requires several staff to keep going.
“Technically there is one full-time staff – that is, me – but there are three other people that we pay on a contractor basis to do different elements like the web master, the fellow that is doing our new website coding and someone else who is our volunteer co-ordinator,” says Beal. “We have 10,000 volunteers worldwide so that is a big job.