The power of the gifting economy.

The power of the gifting economy.

Good Morning.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about the joy of giving and receiving gifts, all because of a story I wrote about a local gifting economy. The “Buy Nothing, Give Something” group exists only virtually, but results in countless in-person interactions every day and exchanges of real goods. 

One of the group administrators is Koly McBride, who runs Paper Wing Theatre. Between setting up and taking down sets, combined with her partner’s junk hauling business, she always has a giveaway pile. She’s found that there is someone out there who wants just about everything she posts, and it saves her the hassle and environmental hazard of bringing it to the dump. "It's not the end-all, because we still have to make less waste,” she says, “but this is how we should all be striving to live, because you find anything secondhand." 

One day, McBride decided she wanted a George Foreman Grill and a popcorn popper, and her coffee grinder broke. By the end of the day, she’d gotten all three items—used, free, someone else’s trash getting a new life in her kitchen. 

Lest you think the idea of a gifting economy is undermining local businesses, the Buy Nothing Project did a survey (OK, it’s a small survey, with some 2,000 responses out of 1.2 million Buy Nothing members worldwide) and 90 percent of respondents say they save money thanks to their local gift economy. Most of them, about 88 percent, spend that money on local goods and services, travel, education or donate it—it’s not the end of commerce, but it is a way to help us stop buying stuff we don’t need, and a way to help literal trash find new life.

I recently found a buoy washed up on the beach, and carried it home, intending to throw it out. But then I realized there was a phone number written in marker on the foam; I texted the phone number, and the owner of the buoy wrote back to thank me and shared the suspicion that someone had cut it from a trap, and told me without the trap the buoy was just trash, as I suspected. I decided to post it on Buy Nothing, and someone came to pick it up—out of the garbage, into the decoration pile.

When I got to the garage-cleaning stage of shelter-in-place, I rediscovered a roll of funky wallpaper someone once gave to me, featuring a bold kitchen-themed pattern with avocados, full-bellied wine glasses, heaping bowls of green peas. I was prepared to toss it into the recycling bin. Instead I posted it on Buy Nothing, and within hours, a neighbor on my block who I’d never met stopped by to pick it up. She cut it up, framed it, and hung the pieces in her kitchen—I know because she sent me photos of her new decor. Someday, post-pandemic, maybe we’ll meet for a glass of wine in her kitchen, where my trash is now her artwork. 

That is the power of the gifting economy—to connect us not just to stuff we need, but to each other. 

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com