Reuse question

From a fuel/energy standpoint it's best to give the item to your friend or colleague. You can schedule the exchange while you are already together, thus extra fuel/energy is not being used.

The other options will use fuel for the sole purpose of delivering/receiving the item.

 

If you give it to a charity thrift store, there's a multiplier effect. They get some cash for their charitable activities, and the item still gets reused.

edit: Our local thrift store happens to be pretty close, and we try to combine it with a trip to the recycling centre, along with another stop on the way home. The additional gas use is hardly worth the time to calculate.

 

Give it to people on craigslist. The salvation army is a church run business, they will never receive my goods. Goodwill is independent from any religious ties so I sometimes give there. They do help out trying to find jobs for the homeless and such so it is a good organization, but the stuff I have to give isn't really useful for that purpose. I don't have clothes and business suites, mostly "stuff".

Mostly I just put up an ad on craigslist saying it is free and on the curb. Gone in hours usually.

 

We give all our re-usables to the VA. They come and pick everything up. Some items they give to vets living in need, and the rest they sell in their store and use the proceeds to benefit vets, too. It's a win-win for the vets.

 

I'd say there are two competing issues.

One is how much fossil fuel/time you need to expend to be rid of the items.

The second is the value-in-use of the items once re-used. I mean, taking a useful item, and sticking it in somebody else's garage, that's not exactly coming ahead, socially.

On the second issue, without doubt, the best approach is to give used items to an organization for resale. If you believe in markets, to that extent.

On net, if they know their business, your donee will sell your donation at a low-but-reasonable price, and the buyer won't bother to acquire it unless he or she intends to use it. So it'll go to somebody who'll appreciate it.

My shorthand: To an economist, free is a four-letter-word.

On the fossil-fuels thing, my solution (as my family did today) is to take the donation to the store on the day you want to shop the store. It's entertainment, it's family values, it's environmental values, its (pardon the phrase) basic Christian values ... all wrapped up in one sloppy trip to the local vendor. Which in our case is Unique thrift store, which is just one heck-of-a-well-run outfit. http://www.yelp.com/biz/unique-thrift-store-falls-church

Dropped off (mainly) a bunch of things the kids had outgrown. Scored numerous half-price T-shirts @ about $2/each, plus some cooking stuff.

Honestly, even given that their raw material is free, it is worth the price to patronize Unique purely for their clearing-house function. I'm not talking charity here, I'm talking paying a reasonable price for the excellent service they provide. I'm just talking about the efficiency of a market over one-to-one transactions..

It is more efficient, for me, to have somebody say "here's 300 T-shirts from across the region, pick what you like" than to take pot luck with some any one-on-one transaction. Even if free.

Anyway. There's a reason marketplaces exist. My suggestion is two-fold. Donate it to a marketplace, and, as long as you're there, patronize that marketplace lavishly.

I'm a well-to-do American by most objective standards. And when any item comes up, for our needs, the first place I think of shopping for it is my local big thrift store, Unique. Compared to shopping at the mall, it's (fill-in-the-blank) ... cheaper, more environmentally sound, more fun - you name it -- to shop at Unique. We can't buy everything there (couldn't find a suit to fit, for example), but it's a reasonable place for a lot of goods.

Edit, aside: Took my kids to Potomac Mills, last month, to let them see what Malls are really like. Like an anthropology field trip ... before malls go extinct. Potomac Mills is a mega-mega-mall, in Woodbridge, VA. We'd described it, but the kids couldn't believe it 'till we'd walked the length of it. My son said, I finally get Wall-E (the movie). Yeah. My kids don't get most of my environmental blather, but shopping-for-entertainment, they got.