A free website for passing on unwanted stuff to new owners for free

Brendan Burgess

Founder
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54,790
"FreeTrade Ireland is a unique public service allowing you to pass on and pick-up items free of charge. Get involved today and start saving money and protecting your environment."

I highlighted a similar service here before, but I forget its name. Has anyone else used it?
 
Hi Brendan,

It used to be on DublinWaste.ie and was a Dublin-based service but it's gone national now. It used to be just for householders but now businesses can use it to advertise desks, filing cabinets, chairs etc etc and small start-ups could use it to set up their offices.

On a personal note, my Dad was taking the bath out of the bathroom at home and he didn't know how he was going to get rid of it without it costing him a fortune to have a waste collector take it. So I said to put it up on Free Trade Ireland and within 4 hours, he had someone interested! It was a cast iron bath (not one of the fancy free-standing ones, mind) in fairly good condition and a fella drove 50 miles down to the Midlands to take it from him. Dad got rid of the bath and the other chap got himself a bath in good nick and no money changed hands!

My wife was giving out that our coffee tables were (a) in the way and (b) dust catchers so I put them up and had a taker within an hour.

Anyway, the website is as above and there's a facebook page at ww.facebook.com/freetradeireland
 
I signed up to http://www.freecycle.org/group/IE/Ireland but nothing I entered to give away seemed to make it onto the general screen, so can't say how successful it would be for others.
 
Gervan said:
I signed up to freecycle.org/group/IE/Ireland but nothing I entered to give away seemed to make it onto the general screen, so can't say how successful it would be for others.
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Hi Gervan. On Free Trade Ireland, the latest ad goes straight to the top of the list of items offered when you do a general search and on the homepage, the latest 8 items with pictures attached are in a Recently Posted items gallery so there's no fear of your ad not getting up on the general screen.

In relation to other similar sites, the items are listed in date order so the newest posted ads will be highest up the list. You can serach by location and within a certain radius of your town.

There's also a live counter that shows how many items have been passed on through Free Trade since its inception.
 
I used dublinwaste.ie when it was in existance to get rid of an old Singer sewing machine. It was a bit of an antique, but in perfect working order. Within a few hours of it being posted we had a call and two gentlemen in a van showed up later to collect it. Great resource. I also know someone who got themselves a futon off it.
 
I think Dublinwaste is now the freetrade one Brendan listed. I used it a few times, got rid of beds, chairs, bedside locker and a table or two. Couple of beefy Polish lads showed up, and took the lot. It's a great idea.
 
horusd said:
I think Dublinwaste is now the freetrade one Brendan listed. I used it a few times, got rid of beds, chairs, bedside locker and a table or two. Couple of beefy Polish lads showed up, and took the lot. It's a great idea.
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That's the one, horusd.

Free Trade started on DublinWaste.ie but it was just a Dublin-based service then.

Now it's a nationwide service. It was pretty popular in Dublin alright and it's great to see the positive experiences of using it folks so hopefully proves to be as useful for everyone from Fair Head to Mizen Head as it has for the last two posters

If you go to the Facebook page as well, facebook.com/freetradeireland, we post up the Item of the Day, every day....and if you like the page, hit the Like button
 
Ya know this is a really useful service for unusual stuff. I had a big old extendable chair. I hated it, tho it was fierce comfy ( it was green yuk!). A fellah showed up for it in a Micra or something tiny. He had been looking for just such a thing for his elderly mother. To buy a new one would have cost him an arm & leg. He was thrilled, I was chuffed that it was going to a good home & a good use, and not to a Tip. He dropped me down a bottle of vino by way of a thank you - I didn't have the heart to tell him I don't drink!
 
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Yeah, the woman who took the coffee tablkes from me was delighted and said she'd passed on a television to a local primary school and a week later she got a card in the post that the kids had made her as a thank you!
 
Some [broken link removed]in the Green Living supplement of the Sunday Independent yesterday!!!
 
Apologies if it came across like that. To be honest, I'm probably just a little over-excited about it. I'll try to avoid that kind of thing.
 

Thanks for passing it on Berndan - I'll take a look at it.

You never know what you might find on offer!

ONQ.
 
Why is the State spending money on a site that provides the same service as that provided by numerous others?

I appreciate less waste = good, but if the service is already provided I don't see the point. There are generally significant hosting and development costs associated with these sites. I'm pretty sure bmcintyre has a family to feed and isn't doing this out of the goodness of his own heart - nor should he.

http://www.jumbletown.ie/
http://www.gumtree.ie/
 


To address that, I don't get anything from pushing the site. I'm not a web designer. The website isn't something I developed and whether people use it or not, I don't benefit from it. Except in the general sense of there being less waste.

Anyhoo, gumtree isn't the same. Jumbletown is but I won't comment any further on that as I'm biased about freetradeireland.
 

RPS Consulting are the company behind the site, they've got plenty of money before from Dublin City Council before. Why they need RPS to be involved is hard to fathom. A central govt agency could have built this site for 5k. How much of a retainer are RPS on for this and what are they actually bringing to the site?

The site is also strangly bereft of mentioning RPS's involvement (from a quick scan anyway).

I can see the benefit of maybe launching an advertising campaign encouraging people to recycle, but not this.

Jobs for the boys is what this site is about as far as I can see.
 
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