After having a bad traffic accident a few years ago, Bermudian Vanessa Cooper was living in the United Kingdom and needed a cheap piano in a hurry. She turned to the website www.Freecycle.org and found a working, antique piano that someone was giving away. All she had to do was collect it. It turns out that some things in life are free.

Freecycle describes itself as a grassroots network and non-profit community. It is not so much a "free-for-all" as a "gifting". Its success depends not just on take, but also on give. Members have the opportunity to give away items they no longer want, and get items for free. The aim is to keep useable items from ending up at the dump. Freecycle is actually a collection of smaller groups that operate on a regional basis. Each group is run by a local moderator and membership is free.

"A friend of mine belonged to Freecycle," said Mrs. Cooper who is a project administrator at a construction company. "She had just had her first child and you know how baby clothes move around. Kids grow out of them so fast, and they are so expensive to buy in the store. She recommended the website to me and I joined. I was living outside of London in Woking at the time. When I moved back to Bermuda I actually emptied my entire house through Freecycle."

Her antique piano went back the way it had come, when a Freecycle member came and carted it off.

"We didn't have the time to sell things," said Mrs. Cooper. "We had a piano and furniture and things like that. The one I had had the old candle holders on the sides. It was beautiful. It was so old that it was really difficult to keep in tune, so it had to be tuned pretty often, which is why they were giving it away for free."

Mrs. Cooper started a Freecycle group in Bermuda about two years ago, and it now has around 30 members. She is the moderator.

"It is the sort of thing that worked so well where I was," she said. "We had a really active group where I was in the UK. We were moving everything from cars to boats. People were actually giving their cars away. It is a lot of effort to sell them sometimes. With Freecycle, the person getting whatever it is, is the one to put in the effort."

She said she would like to see more people join the Bermuda Freecycle group. She thought that Freecycle might be a good option for people undertaking spring cleaning in the post-Christmas lull.

"We do things like room of the month," she said. "I will e-mail out a room, and people go through that room and find anything they want to give away and list it. When you run out of rooms, you just cycle through. It is good sorting through those rooms. I collect junk. I am really bad. I hate throwing things away. If it is going to someone else who wants it then that is fine."

She said Bermuda is a good place for a Freecycle group, because of the large guest worker population that is constantly coming and going.

"If you are going to be coming here for a year-long contract, are you really going to want to spend a lot of money buying kitchen utensils, and things like that?" she said. "My mother got a vacuum for Christmas, and she has another one that is perfectly good. It is just not suitable for our house. We have animals and it doesn't pick up animal hair very well. The other vacuum is a couple of months old and perfectly good, so I am going to put that on Freecycle.

"You may have changed the colour of your sitting room, or something like that. It could be something really big, or something really, really small. In the United Kingdom we use to have teachers use it to ask for things like cardboard tubes for art projects, and people would send them."

The Bermuda group is only open to Bermuda residents, because the getter has to physically collect the item, unless it is small enough to be put into a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

"We have a lot of people in other countries asking to join, for no apparent reason," said Mrs. Cooper. "I did make an exception for one overseas member. Her mother died and she had a week to get rid of everything in her mother's house. It wasn't worth the time and effort to try to sell everything. So we actually cleared out her house. She spent a few days in Bermuda and stayed at her mother's house and people just turned up and took whatever they wanted. We got pretty much everything. She would have had to have taken all of that stuff to the Tynes Bay incinerator. I don't think she even had a truck load to go in the end and it was a pretty big house."

She said Freecycle groups work best with lots of members. The local group has periods of activity and periods of quiet.

"If someone is offering something, the more people we have in the group, the more people know about it and the more likely you will be to find someone to take it.

For more information about Freecycle go to their website at www.freecycle.org. The Bermuda Freecycle website is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BdaFreecycle/. There is also a sister webpage http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bdacafe/ where members can chat generally, exchange recipes or discuss recycling, garage sales, special events or environment related topics.