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Comment by femto | Hacker News Reader

Careful. Putting stuff on the kerb outside of official kerbside collections is considered illegal dumping in many Australian cities. It's hard to prosecute though, as the council generally needs to catch the offender in action ("not my stuff on the footpath guv"). Unless the law changes, it seems like a bad idea to dump something on the kerb, then post proof of your actions to a website. Councils will potentially view Curbit as an evidence collection service, rather than a recycling service.

Can anyone from Curbit confirm whether this will be an issue? It might be as simple as telling people to put the items in their front yard, rather than on the footpath.

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Hey femto, I'm Dean McPherson (@dean_mcpherson), the dev making Curbit. Our current plan is exactly that, if the user is posting their own stuff, we ask them to place it in a legal, accessible location. This is accomplished by asking them for special pickup instructions (e.g. "On the porch", or "On top of the mailbox").

The other big use case though is reporting stuff that others have dumped. Using the app makes no statement that you put the stuff there, and we in no way are trying to encourage people to break the law :)

Thanks for the response Dean. One also needs to be careful if picking stuff up without the owner's permission, as it is technically theft. Granted that prosecution is unlikely.

Maybe councils would be prepared to pay for the "reporting stuff that others have dumped" aspect? If not, they might pay for a "report stuff that needs our attention" aspect: using Curbit's infrastructure to provide a stream of pictures of pot holes, broken signs, etc. with attached time/GPS coordinates?

IIRC, in America items placed near bins, used for regular refuse pick up fit into the legal category of "abandoned" property, and are thus pretty much fair game...or are treated as such for all practical purposes...

Where I live that seems to be the case...no one cares...

That is, unless local (city) codes legislate differently...

Creating services for local government to use is definitely an avenue of monetisation we will investigate later down the track if the app gains traction.

Obviously however, user privacy and encouraging the core use of the app is the primary concern, and we won't pursue any method of monetisation that will jeopardise that.

I'd use something like Curbit if it matched my stuff with charities that want it.

I believe (on faith) that local charities make better use of my stuff. My "go to" charity is the local services for the blind, because an ex-gf works for eye surgeons.

Though it'd be more convenient, I'm loathe to give to Goodwill (greedy execs, bad labor relations), Salvation Army (homophobes, jesus freaks), Red Cross (misrepresenting how donations are used).

I'm cool with Habitat for Humanity.

[I live in the USA.]

We have something like this in San Francisco for furniture mostly: http://www.communitythriftsf.org

They pick up your stuff, you choose a charity, they sell the item to someone else and the proceeds go to the charity. As it turns out, most charities want cash not my old bookshelves but (the confusingly named) Community Thrift Store sorts it all out.

That's a cool idea. A lot of charities in Aus will come and pick up stuff that's valuable if you organise it.

With Curbit we're really trying to create infrastructure for one way gifting that takes the weight of organisational weight off the donor. There is nothing stopping charities from picking up items listed on Curbit though.

Yes it is illegal, but if my council is anything to go by the chance of anyone using curbit’s data to prosecute anyone is close to zero.

This basically happens organically anyway. There are teams of pickers who come around just before council pickups and take away anything of value (and lots of stuff of no value too). All that gets left to be collected by the council is the absolute rubbish (rotting mattresses, etc).

What I want to know with these sort of startups is how do they plan on making money?

At the moment, we're not really interested in monetising. We're treating this as infrastructure that we wish existed that doesn't. However, if it does turn out to solve a problem for people, I'm confident that we will be able to generate enough small methods of monetisation to keep the doors open.

Might be related to your current venture, but I'd use an app whereby neighbours notified each other of any spare bin space they had that week. I could often use extra recycling or green waste space, but hate being the guy roaming the street at night trying to stuff garbage in random bins.

It might be worth teaming up with a local charity in this case. You could give the charity first pick of the items and then open it up to the public.

Good luck with the project.

> There are teams of pickers who come around just before council pickups and take away anything of value

That's illegal too, someone was recently prosecuted for this. Councils own anything put out for council cleanup. They make money selling and recycling this stuff.

EDIT: My council (like many others) don't enforce this rule. They do come down hard on illegal dumping though.

Well not at my council - they just throw everything into the back of the garbage truck and crush it on the spot. Not too much value left after this :)

Councils picking up and disposing of stuff is paid for by the council. Councils are your customer.

Collect stats on the number and type of items picked up per council. If you get any traction, tell the councils it will cost X$ to keep the service running in their area.

This will only work if it solves the problem of illegal dumping. I have yet to see anything of any value dumped in my area outside of the normal council pickup times and during these times the pickers do this job already of hauling away all the stuff of value.

I am amazed at how low in value the pickers will go. I have thrown out stuff with almost zero value and they have taken it away. My wife and I are always amazed at what gets taken by them.

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