Yesterday I went through my cable box, sorted it into four bags (Power supplies, USB connectors, AV cables, and ethernet cables).
And having done so, I'm about to send 90% of it to the local dump/recycling. Because I don't need more than two spare power cables, a couple of USB cables, and a couple of ethernet cables.
And this seems like a huge waste. I have a bunch of chargers there which would no doubt be useful to someone who is right now having to order ones from Ebay/Amazon instead.
So my suggestion is this:
1) Everyone catalogues their spare cables on a website.
2) Next time you need a cable you go to the website and say "5m ethernet cable", and it tells you that Bob, who lives three doors up, has a spare one of those. And you can then message them, and arrange to drop round and pick it up.
Which, I guess, is "Free ebay for local things". Or "Freecycle, only it's not going to get thrown out this week if nobody picks it up". Or "A local library of stuff, but stored in people's homes."
Which, thinking about it further, would make sense with books, DVDs, and loads of other stuff. I'm getting rid of a bunch of DVDs, books, etc. right now. But they've been sitting on shelves for a long time, so if someone else had wanted to take them off my hands I'd have been fine with that. A distributed lending library whereby you promise not to throw anything away unless it's been sitting unborrowed for more than a year would be very useful.
Anyway. Someone should make that happen.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
