This page is the expression of a deep and firm conviction that the redistribution of physical items on Earth must become a generalised mechanism in our societies and an ordinary part of our everyday life, above and beyond recycling and waste disposal. In these times of ecological emergency, the issue of redistribution (a practice which has always existed in past societies) must gain public attention and, more importantly, public funding.
What are household items? They are everything we ever use in our houses and gardens: clothes, shoes, electric and electronic equipment, baby items, furniture, books, toys, decorative objects, kitchenware etc. etc. etc. The list can actually be never-ending. Or if you want: everything polluting our life.
What is redistribution? Basically it means receiving a still-good-to-use household item from a donor and transferring it to another person/family who needs it on that moment (a beneficiary). This exchange should be managed by a publicly funded institution set up for this very purpose. Also, this exchange should be governed by rules established at political level (for example: the criteria based on which a person can be registered as a beneficiary).
Why redistribution? Follow our page :) We have HUNDREDS of reasons and we will post roughly one reason per day. Then we will go in detail!!
What happens now with our household items? We put them in the garbage or we take them to a recycling centre. Very often we need to pay for the services of the recycling centres, which can be extremely costly if we want to dispose of heavy items, for example furniture. However, if the item we do not need any more is still in very good condition, we would like to give it away to another person who does need it. If we are lucky, we find someone in our own family or circle of friends and acquaintances. But these cases are very rare. When was the last time you could give a good household item to somebody you knew, in comparison with the quantity of objects you have thrown away all this time? Some people think then further and start looking for a charity organisation. Again, these cases are even rarer. Charities do not exist at every corner of a street, and very often they are focused on other kinds of actions.
Whenever we think of the objects around us as having an insignificant value ("I only paid 4 dollars for it") or as simply being unimportant, we are wrong. Most materials come from nature, and somebody worked to produce that object. We paid 4 dollars, not "only" 4 dollars. We needed it, liked it, used it, it existed in our house and in our life. Sometimes we even get very attached to some items, whether we like to admit it or not. We do not want to throw them away when they are still beautiful and in good condition, especially when we know there are so many people in this world who would need them, use them and love them just like we did – or even more and longer, because poverty teaches to appreciate.
While interfering neither with people’s personal choices nor with the process of recycling or of ecological waste disposal, redistribution should take the upper hand in our societies by providing all wannabe donors with the possibility of taking their stuff to a trusted institution/centre/service which can transfer them to a person in need.
Concretely, how should redistribution be organised? For redistribution to work properly and give results, it must be organised at national level. It must no longer be left to the people or to the charities or to sporadic projects.
There must be a permanent central structure with local structures in all the cities. Clear rules must be written down, promotion campaigns must be organised, fairness and transparency must be ensured so that citizens can quickly gain trust in the project. The role of such services for redistribution of household items should be of intermediary between donors and beneficiaries. Donors must know clearly where and when they can bring their donations. Beneficiaries must be selected on very well-defined criteria (financial criteria, social criteria etc.). The redistribution centres could have:
a Reception Office in charge of receiving and registering the donors and the donations;
a First Sorting Office where every object received is carefully examined to decide whether it can indeed be reused;
a Cleaning Room where the reusable objects get washed or otherwise cleaned, dried and - as the case may be - ironed;
a Second Sorting Office where these clean items are registered, sorted out by category, and stocked in view of their distribution to the beneficiaries;
a Distribution Department in charge of the distribution itself and of the follow up on the beneficiaries.
Consequently, we speak about an institution. We speak about a structure which needs funding, personnel, equipment, premises. It cannot be done effectively on a small scale. Maybe it could be organised on a regional level, but the best option is that it comes from the national level so that the funding is ensured and that the system’s benefits can spread in time over the whole society.
Here are some examples of how a Centre for redistribution of household items could work in practice:
1. A family of 2 parents and 4 children has financial difficulties. They register with the Centre and they file a list of objects which they need in their everyday life.
maybe the family has baby twins and they would need a double pushchair;
maybe the father would need a suit and good shoes to be able to go to job interviews;
maybe their house has not enough furniture and they would need a cupboard in the kitchen;
maybe they have schoolgoing children who would need school supplies.
The number or the value of the distributed items can, of course, be limited per person or per family. Again, criteria can be established.
2. A wheelchair user now has an electrical wheelchair and would like to donate his mechanical wheelchair to a person who needs it. This can be done through the Centre. Actually, anything that is ever put up for donation can be intermediated by the Centre.
3. The Centre can have a website/page/app where they can put the outstanding requests online. For example, a beneficiary would urgently need a fridge, but lately no fridge has been donated to the Centre. If this request is set online (without the beneficiary’s personal data, of course), people can see that somebody out there urgently needs a fridge, and so the chances of finding a donor increase a lot.
Isn’t this social cohesion? Yes, it is. And social cohesion is just one of those hundreds of reasons we spoke about. Be with us, let’s do this.
Photo above: donations of medical material, clothes, and bedclothes for a rest home in a poor region (a great, but small initiative; so much more could be done institutionally!)
