My friend John put me on to FreeCycle. It’s essentially an on-line “swap & shop” radio show (remember them?). If you have something you want to get rid of and don’t want the hassle of selling it, just offer it on your local FreeCycle. I joined about a month ago, specifically to see if I could locate a scanner. Last week an office about a mile from my home offered an HP scanner that works with my Mac, has OCR, and can scan slides and negatives. Perfect.
Here’s what their website says:
The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,851 groups with 6,690,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.
Here in Cincinnati there are 3 flavors, organized geographically (City, East Side, West Side), with a few thousand people in each one.
WARNING: do NOT confuse this with FreeCycle.com, which appears to be a rip-off site advertising deals which are for the most part not free.
cleve callison’s blog 
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