It’s a dirty little secret that discarded household items still useful enough to take to Goodwill are sometimes set out in the curbside trash instead. At times, it’s because of the pressure of rushed lives. Other times, that ugly old lamp or broken chair might not seem to its owner to have any value left.
The Goedzak — think “good sack” — is a way to let your neighbors decide whether those unwanted items still have some life left in them. The clear plastic makes the stuff visible to every passer-by in an open invitation to curbside freecycling.
The design, by Simon Akkaya of Amsterdam design studio Waarmakers, resulted from his graduation project — engagingly titled “Design for Altruism” — at Delft University of Technology. “My goal was to design products that stimulate people to act to benefit others, preferably complete strangers,” he writes on the Waarmakers website.
He explains there that “everybody owns items that are no longer of value to them. Every now and then we throw out these items, while they still might be of value and/or useful to others. These items disappear in grey garbage bags and end up on trash piles. Goedzak offers these items a second chance. Goedzak stimulates people to dispose of their products in a more conscious and sustainable way. Goedzak can extend the products’ lifetime.”
Read more at: http://www.oregonlive.com/hg/index.ssf/2013/01/one_cool_or_crazy_thing_the_go.html
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Green Real Estate Appraiser 