The Free Shop

Jul 3rd, 2008 by katesaltfleet

This has been a hectic week for me as I have been away at the NASES conference with work, and tomorrow I’m heading off to France on holiday. It was great to meet up with other student job shop staff and I’ve got loads of ideas to put into practice online and offline

Photo by Dan4th

Our conference was hosted at the wonderful Leeds University Union, who even provide soya milk to have with your museli, how fantastic is that?! Between workshops, I went to have a sneaky peak at their facilities (they have 5 bars - count ‘em), but the thing that really caught my imagination was The Free Shop.

Working on a similar premise to Freecycle, the Green Streets project is an attempt to recycle the vast amounts of rubbish put out by students at the end of the academic year. This is a real problem in Leeds as transporting stuff is an issue for students and sometimes the cost of transport outweighs the value both in monetary and usefulness terms. Stuff was just getting dumped out onto the streets or stuck in landfill and students were becoming very unpopular with their neighbours, so Leave Leeds Tidy was established in conjunction with the city council. Students can drop off their unwanted items to the Free Shop volunteers who sort it and display it. Then anyone can walk in off the street and take anything they want. There are charity buckets around the place for you to leave a donation, but this is optional.

Needless to say I visited the shop and picked up a couple of items myself