"We threw away things people kill each other for now."
- Denzel Washington's character in "The Book of Eli."
Every day, New Hampshirites probably trash over a hundred tons of items which (under other circumstances) would save lives. Grocery bags, watertight containers, pieces of cloth, etc...things that are reasonable to pitch. But if there were an interruption in commerce, these items and other "usable throwaways" would run short. You would wish you had kept more of them during the preceding months. What if there were an intermediate option that combined the advantages of throwing them away with the advantages of keeping them?
I call this concept "Little Free Surplus," inspired by the Little Free Libraries. Ideally each LFS would be an easy-on-the-eyes box of potentially useful throwaways. It might sit publicly available at the edge of its owner's driveway...with a small sign explaining its purpose. In this example, anyone could add or remove items at their convenience. Or to avoid getting dumped on, maybe you could store an LFS in a less public location...perhaps only friends/neighbors could add and subtract from it. You could even keep it to yourself. Suppose there were one or two in every neighborhood. During normal times people could donate to them or take from them as appropriate. Some items are too useful to throw away, while too damaged for goodwill....but one man's junk is another man's treasure even in good times. During a big disaster, the whole LFS would become valuable, and more importantly it would be pre-positioned. Probably the owner of the property would simply bring it inside for use or resale. That's better than going unused in a landfill, and it would mean at least there are more usable items within that neighborhood at the beginning of the troubles. But ideally the LFS would become a trading center or a place where you put and retrieve usable items that are considered surplus even during the crisis.
Here's what an LFS might easily contain just by keeping your eyes open at the transfer station or collecting your own throwaways for a year:
https://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?topic=28933.msg300857#msg300857Ways you can help:
- If you have the heart to serve as a humanitarian resource during a disaster, or a desire to have a free disaster supply box that people fill for you... you can provide space for LFS.
- If you have extra "usable throwaways," you could donate some to an LFS instead of pitching them.
- If you have a vehicle...you could transport such items from collectors to receivers...or from one LFS to another.
Maybe we could start an LFS network. Maybe we could reduce waste and loss of life in one go.
But good things start small. I'm collecting the contents for *one* LFS now. And I'm not sure I have a good place to put it long term. I need a volunteer or two in south west or south central New Hampshire who likes this idea and can provide me about ten square meters of free space. It can be indoors or outdoors, available to the public or not...but the main thing is you would need to take possession of it. I might not be able to come back and move it. You can contact me by posting here on forum.freestateproject.org, by message me here or by emailing me. Go to RidleyReport.com and click "about" to see my email addie.
"Little Free Surplus:
Turn your trashes
Into emergency caches!"
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Topic: Little Free Surplus needs 10 square meters of outdoor space (NH) (Read 2607 times)