Half a pot of yellow paint, a push-along lawnmower and a pile of old bricks might not sound like treasure but that’s exactly what they are to Edinburgh’s “freecycling” community. Though the name suggests an extreme sport, freecycling is much more prosaic. Swap Shop meets eBay, it’s a way of finding a home for things you no longer need but don’t want to throw away. Simply advertise the item in the local section of the Freecycle website and, if a fellow freecycler wants it, they can have it for nothing as long as they’re willing to pick it up.

The UK has the third-largest freecycling community outside America, with the ever-growing number of participants currently at 20,000 — a six-fold increase in membership over the last two months alone. There are already 2,000 freecyclers involved in groups in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bathgate, Aberdeen and Dundee, and that figure is rising every day.

Cynics might ask why anyone would want somebody else’s old junk. And with items such as 1980s fluorescent ski gear, a single double-glazed window and a Cyrillic script typewriter among recent postings that seems a fair point. But, to the dedicated freecycler, there is no such thing as rubbish. Take something as mundane as tiles. A member of the Edinburgh group, Joelle Marlow, snapped some up recently from the website, not because she wanted to redecorate but to use for making mosaics.

Elsewhere people have offered a single train ticket from Edinburgh to Devon, invitations to private gallery viewings and even a part-built canoe.

It would be wrong to imply that none of the items offered have conventional value, though. Fellow freecycler Simone Hutchinson, a member of both the Edinburgh and Glasgow groups, says she has been impressed to see pianos and pool tables on offer. “It’s surprising what’s there,” she says. “Most of it would be pretty profitable if it was sold but I think there is a like-mindedness to freecycling. People want to get away from salesmanship. I quite fancied the piano but I live in a tenement so I’m not sure how the other people on the stair would have felt.”

Fortunately Hutchinson’s concern for her neighbours hasn’t stopped her benefiting from the site. She recently met up with the Glasgow-based graphic designer Karen Gourlay to take an Apple computer monitor off her hands. Or, more correctly, out from under her dining-room table.

“I didn’t need the monitor any more but it was still functional and it had cost me hundreds of pounds,” explains Gourlay. “I had it tucked away under the table for months. Then I heard about freecycling through Radio 4 and decided to try it.

“I hate the fact we throw so much stuff away and this seemed a great alternative. It gives you a warm glow to think that someone’s got something that was no use to you but has value to them. And it’s great not to be hitting my toes on the monitor every time I sit down for dinner.”

The freecycling phenomenon started in Tucson, Arizona, two years ago, but has only really started picking up pace in the UK over the last six months. Founded by a Tucson local, Deron Beal, as a reaction to the prospect of encroaching landfill, he salvaged what he could from a dump and offered the items to other people by email. “I live in the Sonora desert, which is one of the most beautiful deserts in the world. And smack-dab in the middle of this desert, you’ve got this hideous landfill, half of which is full of perfectly good reusable stuff,” he sighs.

The idea took off and there are now more than a million freecyclers worldwide, all based around local communities to ensure that items can be easily exchanged. When Beal predicts that “eight months down the line, we’re going to have eight to 10m people doing this”, he’s probably not wrong. Beyond the vast numbers involved in America, there are already around 30,000 freecyclers in Australia, 5,000 in Germany, 700 in Japan and even a pioneering group of nine in Azerbaijan.

Marlow first heard about freecycling through a similar initiative, the Edinburgh branch of the Local Exchange Trading Scheme (Lets), through which people swap items and services for Reekies, a local alternative currency. She believes freecycling has really taken off locally because it’s so easy to use. “Freecycling shows how simply something can be done. It requires no system of joining or identification, which can act as a barrier for busy people who don’t get round to form filling,” she explains.

“I am passionate about recycling. People still throw out huge amounts of perfectly good stuff.” She’s not alone. Ask most freecyclers why they signed up and one of the main attractions of the concept is that it is environmentally friendly. Many of the items that get offered would not only be difficult to sell but they often aren’t suitable for donating to charity shops either (many charities no longer take electrical goods or pick up large objects). Now, instead of throwing them out, they can be freecycled. Not only that, but you know exactly where they’ve gone.

“People still feel like part of a community here,” says Beth Brownlee, the co-moderator of the Edinburgh freecycling group, who recently put some baby clothes on the freecycling website. “I was quite precious. Of course it doesn’t really matter who gets them, but people do have concerns about where things end up and you can be quite sentimental about it.”

Freecycling isn’t without its negatives. If something doesn’t get snapped up quickly, you may be left with it sitting under your dining-room table for months. There’s also a great deal of trust involved in believing that someone will turn up after agreeing to take something. “There is no means of giving feedback like there is on eBay so you never know how reliable the person is you’re giving to or picking up from,” says Gourlay.

It hasn’t put her off though. “I would definitely do it again. In fact I’ve got a whole load of stuff waiting to go on now, including a big pair of hi-fi speakers. They’re valuable but they’re no good to us. We’re just using them as stools at the moment.”

To find out how to join or start a local freecycling group, visit www.freecycle.org

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