Sometimes friends who know my habit try (often successfully) to offload their stuff to me. Just to ask me years later if I happen to own exactly the item they offloaded because they need it.
Also, we should be charging people for their trash. Both companies and consumers imo. It's kinda ridiculous to offload so much waste as an economic externality. I live near a university and every year I get to watch a new set of students move into the student housing. Towards the start of the school year the dumpsters are filled with Ikea and Amazon boxes form all the new furniture. At move out time they have to bring these absolutely massive metal containers (like 3x the size of a shipping container) for the students to through out all their furniture (most of which has been used for less than a year). It's particularly bad with this university since a fifth are international students.
80% of the furniture in my house was "rescued". We used to hoard it and sell it on Craiglist and the like. We once sold a $200 marble table we got for free. Also have two pairs of working air pods and a bunch of $100+ shoes (including some Jordans and a pair of Yeezys) that we just haven't gotten around to selling yet. We also have a bench press and weights, 2 working grills, and too many office chairs. All this and we still save every glass jar and use them as our cups.
Unfortunately, my housemates are not big fans of the mismatched furniture look, but I find it quite charming :(
It's wild how much waste could be averted if all that furniture was simply stored on a plot of land over the summer until the next wave of students came in and then we let them pick through it. We used to pick up everything we could sell, but it just became too much of an effort because of the sheer volume of furniture
If we charged too much, it would encourage hoarding, wouldn't it?
Maybe it's the general crappiness, the planned obsolescence in everything that makes us hold on to all sorts of "spare parts". Back in the day when producing items was hard, a wardrobe would be handed down through multiple generations. Hoarding wasn't feasible but also not necessary.
Are there any thrift store 'charities' nearby? maybe they can arrange to pick up some of the furniture and sell it.
At least it's useful stuff, though.
That said, I do think it's something best left to businesses rather than random people. Moving the eBay stuff out of our home and into a dedicated office/warehouse space has been one of the biggest stress-reducers in my life.
Are you in the UK? Any tips?
We ended up renting a commercial property nearby. Has done wonders for productivity, work-life balance and our ability to hire staff.