Useful, enviro-friendly use of the Google Maps API: Garbage Scout. See something useful being thrown out? Snap a pic with your cell phone and email it (again from your phone) to garbagescout.com, along with the address. An image of the item appears on a Goog map along with location details so others can come snag it. Currently available in New York, San Francisco, and Philly. Can’t decide whether the site needs design help or is in keeping with the subject matter.
Music: Eric Dolphy :: Improvisations and Tukras
Thanks for the link, very cool! Reminds me of freecycle.org, a mailing-list based system which allows you to OFFER or WANT items, always for free, with lists for many communities. Great, simple idea, only thwarted by the inevetably low participation rate…
Boulder CO used to be very scrounge friendly. Every year they had “garbage day” where the city would haul away almost anything left at the curb; cruising around in the few days beforehand always produced treasures (if you ever wanted to make furniture out of old skis, that was the time and place to get them). They also had a digging-friendly recycling center (I once scored three perfect patio-door windows, which I came back in the pouring rain to collect and which immediately went into an outbuilding my Mom was remodeling into a studio). Sadly, both garbage day and the friendly recycling center are now memories (the new one has an eight-foot drop into the metal bin, plus angry NO SCROUNGING signs. Thanks, litigation! So much for precycling…)
-Mike =)
Mike, sad to hear about the end of garbage days and precycling in your area. That’s REALLY crappy. I used to live in Boston and was amazed that they allowed anyone to put ANYthing out on the curb on ANY weekend. It was a precyclers paradise and all the hipsters furnished their houses with stuff from the sidewalks. Here in El Cerrito / Berkeley we just get one or two days a year to put anything out, which isn’t nearly enough, IMO.
What exactly was Boulder’s problem with precycling?