As I mentioned, Jimmy and I - with the help of Corrib Moving - finally moved all of my stuff over from my little one-bedroom condo into his/our home here in Alameda. Combined, the two of us have a lot of stuff. Like, a scary amount of stuff.
My stuff’s primarily craft-related, but I also just love accumulating tools and gadgets, so I also have a lot of…tools and gadgets. =] His stuff I think is a little more varied but includes a ton of old college memorabilia and t-shirts, CDs/DVDs and gifted/adopted pieces of furniture and linens from friends and family. Oh, and a lot of hotel toiletries. So anyway, all this stuff has driven me to aggressively purge a lot of my things (to start) to avoid over-cluttering our newly shared home.
But, what to do with all the discards??? We’ve been trying to adopt more earth-friendly habits here at home and we just watched this eye-opening show on the lifecycle of garbage in America, so that kind of reinforced the desire to find a more responsible way of discarding with everything even though it’d be a lot easier just to haul it downstairs and throw it in the dumpster. Well luckily here in the Bay Area at least, it’s pretty to get rid of the unwanteds. So I thought I’d share. This is by no means a definitive guide, but here’s what I found for the things I’ve had to get rid of:
Household hazardous waste (e.g. paint, cleaners, car products, pesticides, batteries, even grease/cooking oil!) can be dropped off for FREE at drop-off locations in Oakland, Fremont, Hayward and Livermore. There are different schedules for each of these locations but dropping off is easy as pie. As a matter of fact, at the Oakland location (only one I’ve been to) it was a drive-thru operation. A drive-thru! If you can pop your trunk and your stuff is easily identifiable, you don’t even have to get out of your car. Wow! See StopWaste.org for more information, including a downloadable form you need to fill out and hand over.
Electronic waste (old monitors, CPUs, CDs (and their jewel cases!), DVDs, cell phones and other electronics) can be conveniently dropped off for FREE (well, mostly - they charged us $5 to take a huge, nasty microwave off our hands for example but it was totally worth it) at Universal Waste Management’s Oakland facility six days a week. Or, you can wait for an e-waste recycling event closer to you.
Gently used household items (e.g. clothing, furniture, unused toiletries, kitchenware) can be donated to Salvation Army or of course a number of other charitable organizations, but with Salvation Army at least you can easily schedule an online pickup of your items if you have a large collection of items that you can’t drop off at a donation center yourself. When you fill out their online form, a little pop-up will tell you based on your zip code what types of items they will and won’t accept. Also, it’s the driver’s discretion on whether or not they’ll accept certain things. The only item of ours that they didn’t take was the sleeper sofa and that was only because, for liability reasons, they needed us to move it downstairs for them and I was the only one home so that didn’t happen.
OR, if you’re Filipino or have a Filipino mother-in-law like me, you’ll save most of this stuff for her so that she can do up a bunch of balikbayan boxes and ship them off to the Philippines. =]
Plastic bags can be returned to grocery stores like Safeway, where they’ve got collection bins at their entrances. Of course, this is for the plastic bags that you had to take because you forgot to bring your reusable ones. =]
For other miscellaneous items that I wasn’t sure what to do with, including fabric and clothes hangers for example, I checked StopWaste.org’s handy Recycling Wizard. For example, several Goodwill and Thrift Town locations will take plastic clothes hangers (but not wire). In fact, it seems that Goodwill will accept quite a few random things I wouldn’t have thought of dropping off there. Fabric can be donated to Goodwill or, among a bunch of other places, one of my favorite spots - the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse.
This sounds like a lot of places to waste fuel driving to, but it ended up being pretty easy to drop stuff off on the way to one place or another so I don’t think I ever had to make a special trip. I’m still a little stumped on where wire hangers are supposed to go, though. Alameda County Industries lists hangers as going in the black bin (i.e. not recyclable) but notes parenthetically that dry cleaners will take back hangers. But the Recycling Wizard lists what to do with a few different types of wire, just not sure that wire hangers is any one of these.
And yes, going through all that makes me less inclined to add NEW stuff to the mix and try to stick to buying things that we “need” vs. only “want”. Except for that Zappos swimsuit I just picked up. And Jimmy’s watch. Or watches. =D
And that is my recycling roundup for the day!
Addendum: Almost forgot! If you need moving boxes, search the FREE STUFF boards on Craigslist before you part with that hard-earned money! I totally scored and found a good soul not 10 minutes away from our place that had just moved and was giving away their perfectly good and in fact pretty high-quality moving boxes for F R E E. Yippee! We’ll be doing the same if we have any left over after all the donations are done.
