Image © Team Cora
Upcycling is a great idea that can have very useful and beautiful results. There are thousands of crafters and artists who make a living turning what we would consider used up junk into valuable household items or pieces of art.
Connecting those wondering what to do with their trash with those who look at that "trash" as a valuable resource is just one of the goals of a Kickstarter campaign that launched today.
The CORA App is dedicated to the idea that all the "stuff" we need already exists. We just need to find more creative ways to use this existing "stuff" to meet our ever changing needs. By pointing the way to people who need or want your stuff, the CORA App helps keep junk out of the landfills (and rivers and oceans) while supporting artisans who can upcycle it.
How It Will Work:
After downloading the app, simply type in any item that you no longer need, and choose its next life. The new CORA app will enable you to find neighbors who need your stuff, as well as businesses that want it (and may even pay you for it). Get the full walkthrough here.
And if all you want to do is toss your item into a recycling bin, you'll find accurate and up-to-date information about what goes where in your local recycling bins, and where to send things that aren't accepted in your neighborhood.
Team CORA has been funding this project out of its own pocket, but now they're ready to expand their platform, and they're seeking help from the Kickstarter community.
"We need Kickstarter community funds to populate this massive database of both new and existing ways to divert trash from landfills and our waterways," state the founders. "Our database of original and hard-to-find content includes broadcast quality video, stills, tutorials, and interactive educational material.
"Our Kickstarter campaign will allow us to not only create the mobile app across multiple platforms, but spread it fast to your city! Given that the app heavily leverages crowdsourcing to populate and vet the myriad options for landfill diversion, a crowdsource approach to funding seems a natural fit."
Today is the first day of the CORA crowdfunding campaign, and the project has already gathered over $1,000 in pledges from 15 supporters. Stop by the blog at www.teamcora.com to follow the progress of the mobile app and sign up for the private beta. There, you can also join the conversation and discover new ideas to help you reduce, reuse, gift, repurpose or recycle your everyday stuff.
Comments
Amy wrote on 02.27.12, 2:50pm:
The Swap Market app does this also! You take a photo of anything you are no longer using and upload it to the market. Then swap with someone who has something you will use!
Keeping clothes, dvds, cars, books and anything else you can think of in rotation and out of landfills!
Seth Schneider wrote on 02.27.12, 3:12pm:
Thanks for mentioning this resource, Amy. Swap Market can keep things in rotation by giving them a new home for reuse. I suspect a lot of the stuff that will make its way to CORA would be perceived as having low value and not worthy of reuse in its present form -- hence the need to "upcycle" or re-purpose it.
For readers looking for ways to swap things person-to-person, check out Beth's article from last month about World Swap Day: http://shareable.net/blog/january-21-is-world-swap-day. The bottom of her article lists Shareable's guides for organizing food, crop, toy, seed, clothing and media swaps.
If anyone has other resources to add -- whether they're intended for re-use, re-cycle, or another type of "re-" -- please comment below.
Rebecca Rockefeller wrote on 03.01.12, 2:27pm:
Greetings! I'm one of the co-founders of Cora, and I wanted to answer the questions above. But first, thank you, Seth for doing such a wonderful job of clarifying our app! Yes, we are different from Freecycle, Craigslist, and Swap Market - We direct people to all of these resources and more, and our database also includes an ever-growing number of options and connections that allow people and businesses to find new life for items that we currently think are hard to recycle, hard to sell, hard to give away; in short, new life for items that you might think have no value. Our app will connect people with that information as well as connections to existing local networks such as Freecycle and Craigslist. We see what we're doing as working in concert with existing groups to magnify the impact we can have as individuals by quickly and easily connecting people to high-quality curated information.
And yes, we will have a way for individuals as well as businesses to sign up as stewards for a waste stream (or more than one), so that we can start to direct a particular item from the person who's done with it to their closest neighbor who is ready to give that item its next life - A crowdsourced person-to-person cradle-to-cradle network.
If you're interested in joining our Beta group, you can register via our website, www.teamcora.com.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Rockefeller
www.teamcora.com
Seth Schneider wrote on 03.01.12, 4:07pm:
Thank you for that informative comment, Rebecca! Your description make it even clearer to me how Cora will be a clearinghouse for the many existing resources out there already.
At a personal level, I'm especially excited that Cora will allow people and businesses to sign up as stewards for a waste stream. That would work for my brother's situation I described above, it would work for art projects (art teachers, artists, etc.), and for businesses whose upcycling isn't prominently known. There have been countless times when I've thought that *someone* out there must want the seemingly-useless item I was throwing away, and this app will move us closer to a day when those items won't have to be thrown away.
Craigslist and Freecycle have been doing this for a long time, but the difference seems to be that those sites are best suited for a transaction (whether free or paid) between two individuals. The CORA app promises to improve upon that because it can connect individuals with businesses and other organizations that can use an item (such as the coffee bag example in the walkthrough at http://teamcora.com/about/app/), and it can connect people with the relevant recycling information for their area.
The other advantage of CORA over listing services like Craigslist and Freecycle is that it has some intelligence into the item you're done with, instead of having to search through lots of listings or be proficient with setting up filtered RSS feeds, which many people don't do.
I wonder if there will be a way for people to get listed as recipients. For example, my brother is working on a craft project that requires a few dozen clear incandescent light bulbs. He's not a company like the coffee bag recycler, so I wonder if someone like him could list their need for a quantity of items for personal projects. It's a more complicated problem to solve, but I think that will get us even closer to a zero-waste future.