Green Home Remodel Part 3: Ditch the Dumpster

July 28, 2009 from Yourdailythread.com Written by Candice Dickens-Russell

Candice is writing a green home remodel series for YDT as she fixes up her first home. Read part two of her quest-an eco-friendly yard-here. I’m not proud of it, but before moving into our 1940s fixer, my husband, Scott, and I had the words ORDER DUMPSTER at the top of our remodeling list. Not very green of us right?
Most cities will rent commercial-sized dumpsters to homeowners, like the ones from redbox+ dumpster company, when traditional-sized municipal garbage cans won’t cut it. Having purchased a house that included one rotten wood deck, two rickety storage buildings, a bizarre wood burning spa, any piece of furniture the previous owners didn’t feel like packing and what can only be described as miles and miles of wood paneling, we were only too happy to make those arrangements. But I simply couldn’t ignore that I was about to generate hundreds if not thousands of pounds of waste for the landfill.

I had to come up with something else.

Finding someone who actually wants what you consider trash is an interesting exercise. After a bit of success with the Salvation Army and no luck at all with used lumberyards, finally I turned to Craigslist. I contacted more than a dozen individuals looking for scrap wood-everyone from a woman building a dance floor for her upcoming birthday party to a guy getting a jumpstart on a haunted house for Halloween. They came over one by one and hauled away a piece of the shed or the deck or the paneling to put to good use.
Turning to Craigslist once more I held what I think is the world’s first Free Driveway Bazaar. 67 strangers converged upon our little house in one day in search of treasure amidst our trash. Now we were getting somewhere. Gone were the terracotta flowerpots and garden hoses and I happily waved goodbye to outdated furniture that simply didn’t fit in my eco-modern cottage.

I would like to write that in the end we didn’t need to throw anything away, but that wouldn’t be true. Who knew no one would want that rotten wood? After weeks of hoisting junk into the grateful arms of my new Craigslist friends, we ended up ordering a bin that was significantly smaller than the one originally planned for the leftovers. But I’m happy that I took the time to give things away and decrease my landfill contribution by more than ½ thereby keeping another of our green promises: reducing waste.
…..
Destinations to help you ditch the dumpster:
Craiglist
Freecycle
Earth 911
Salvation Army
Goodwill
L.A. ReUseIt Network
Oodle.com

(Or turn it into a dumpster jacuzzi!)
About The Guest Contributor
Candice Dickens-Russell is the Youth Program Manager and CREEC Coordinator at TreePeople. She has worked as a Secondary Education Program Coordniator for TreePeople’s Generation Earth program and as a youth program coordinator for the Earth Resource Fund in Costa Mesa. She serves on the South Bay Business Environmental Coalition Board, the Green Advisory Board of the California Conservation Corps and the Los Angeles Environmental Education Fair steering comittee.