Gap in giveaways and disposal

There is a gap in the market between second hand sales and garbage disposal, and I’m not sure what’s a good way to address it.

These are things that you own that might be useful for someone, but you don’t know who it might be useful for. If one such person is located, you are willing to give the stuff away for free, but you don’t want to make any effort or spend anything to dispose it.

The part of London I used to live in had evolved a simple way of achieving this – people would simply leave stuff out in their front yards very close to the footpath (the compounds didn’t have gates). People walking past were free to pick up whatever they wanted, and after things had been left out for a sufficient period of time, the council would be called and they would pick it up as “garbage”.

Unfortunately when I moved out of London earlier this year, the house we were living in was on the main road (right next to Ealing Broadway station), and this method of disposal of unwanted things wasn’t available to us. And we had to incur significant cost to dispose of some of our stuff.

The wife put up some of them on the UK equivalent of OLX, and managed to sell off a lot of our stuff for not very high amounts (though I think we got more for our mixie than what we’d paid for it 10 years ago). We made money, yes, but it possibly wasn’t significant enough to cover the cost of my wife’s time.

And then there were the books – there were no second hand bookshops available that would pay anything reasonable for the books. So I had to actually cart all the books to the local Oxfam centre to be given away to charity (apart from stuff friends picked up).

Clothes, similarly, had to be dropped off at a charity centre (there was a Cancer Research UK shop right across the road from our house, so that helped). Again, I don’t know if everything we left there was used, but that was the lowest cost way for us to dispose of them.

Coming back, this gap in the market exists in India as well. The market is a bit better here because you have house cleaners and cooks and drivers you interact with on a regular basis, who are happy to take your unwanted stuff off you and dispose it. The problem is that they are picky on what they take and dispose – they have transaction costs, just like us, and don’t want to take on stuff that they will find it hard to move on.

And what makes matters worse is that even putting it in the trash is not a proper solution here – the municipal trash collectors ask for a bribe to take these things off you!

In some sense, this is a classic market design problem – where the transaction cost of the sale overwhelms the value of items being bought and sold. The things we want to dispose of have value to someone, for which they might be willing to pay, but the costs of finding these people are so high that you end up paying to dispose them.

Basically what we need is a service where someone comes and picks up all your “semi-trash”, sorts through it to find stuff that might be useful for someone else and then transfer it to markets where it can reach people who want it. And things that aren’t useful to anyone will go into garbage.

The problem with this service is that there is a natural upper bound on what people will be willing to pay for this service – zero. And when you factor in the market for lemons here (people might use this to dispose of absolute garbage rather than semi-trash that might be useful for someone), you know why “solution doesn’t exist”.

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