Highlighting that “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure”, a local environmental activist has set up an initiative in a bid to reduce waste in the Fermanagh area.

With her Facebook page ‘Fermanagh Freecycle’, Diana McChesney has created a platform where individuals can list unwanted items to give away, opposed to throwing them away or selling them.

Explaining that the inspiration behind the initiative grew from seeing things being dumped that “were brand new” or “had nothing wrong with them”, Diana added that her experience of working in a charity shop also influenced her.

Although charity shops follow a similar initiative to freecycle as they take people’s unwanted items, Diana’s first-hand experience of working in one has opened her eyes to the demand and how, due to a number of factors, some items would end up being thrown away.

She explained: “Through working at a charity I saw what they couldn’t sell. People were donating and offloading what they didn’t want in their house and just giving it to a charity and the charity can’t sell some of the stuff for health and safety reasons or because they don’t have the manpower or because they are just inundated with donations and they can’t process them.”

Diana continued: “So things were getting binned and I was thinking, that’s all very well if they can’t process it but somebody else could. So why can’t the stuff that they are discarding go somewhere else.”

With this in mind and after discussing her concerns with a friend, Diana came up with the idea of setting up Fermanagh Freecycle.

“I used to live in Scotland and freecycle is huge over there and there was no freecycle in Enniskillen or Fermanagh or Omagh and so I thought, ‘well okay, let’s try and put one on Facebook,’” she said.

Three months after setting up the page, it has gained over 900 members, with many actively taking part in the initiative. Noting the vast range of items that people have been giving away via the page, Diana commented: “It’s great to see people posting and great to see people getting what they are posting.”

She continued: “Last week I got rid of a shoddy old cupboard, I’d just painted it to make it do for a couple of months. Last year it would’ve just been going to the skip but I put it on Fermanagh Freecycle and it was in high demand.

“The woman who got it said, ‘this is great, I’m going to up-style it, I’m going to paint it and I know exactly where I’m putting it.’”

“One person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” added Diana.

Explaining why she believes an initiative like Fermanagh Freecycle is important, Diana said: “It’s about getting the word out to reduce, reuse and recycle because if we are reusing what’s in the community, then we are not buying new and therefore we are decreasing the amount of plastic that is in the community, for example.”

Over the few months that Fermanagh Freecycle has been active Diana has started to see a sense of community spirit emerge. “It’s become a little bit of a community thing. Somebody asked me to do an anonymous post to help an autistic person to get some curtain poles up and I posted it because they weren’t allowed to.

“Five minutes later somebody offered to help. So there’s a community spirit there, it’s not like the buy and sell posts, where money is the talking factor.”

Diana continued: “Just because you can sell something, it doesn’t mean you must. There’s a lot of people on this group that have nothing and it’s giving them a chance to get something that they wouldn’t have.”

“With Fermanagh Freecycle nobody profits but everyone benefits,” she added.