Giving stuff away on Freecycle is more trouble than tossing it in a landfill.

Taking it to an op shop isn't trouble-free either.

But I'm not happy chucking out usable hardware and other items with plenty of life left in them. In my case this is a mixture of greenery, plain old-fashioned protestant hatred of waste and memories of hard times.

One alternative is to list unwanted items on TradeMe with a $1 reserve – for overseas readers TradeMe is New Zealand's home-grown equivalent of eBay.

Listing items on TradeMe is free. If they sell, there's a 6.9 percent commission fee. So if the item sells for $1, I'm 7 cents out-of-pocket. Or, more accurately, I'm 93 cents richer as it is something I'm ready to give away. These numbers are so small they are negligible. In effect, there's no discernible cost difference  between selling on TradeMe and giving things away on Freecycle.

Yet the cash element involved seems to oil away some of the friction associated with Freecycle.

As mentioned in Frustrating Freecycle, Freecycle transactions don't always go smoothly. In my experience more than half fall through.

While many are  fine, some Freecycle people are a pain to deal with.

On the other hand, when someone pays for an item on TradeMe, no matter how small the price, the nature of the deal is different. People turn up as promised.

I suspect the reason for this is people don't put a value on things they get free, so they don't value my time and effort at the other end of a Freecycle transaction and feel comfortable stuffing me around. When they pay, the transaction has a value to them and they act accordingly.

Thanks to Parsley72 who pre-empted this post in a comment on Frustrating Freecycle.

Your view may differ.

Benefits of TradeMe over Freecycle:

• Money oils away transaction friction
• Feedback scores show good people to deal with
• There's a legitimacy with TradeMe
• Questions and answers get dealt with in a single, visible place
• Efficient, no need to deal with tons of emails after items are taken
• Less email aggravation, less rudeness for disappointed recipients
• TradeMe has wider reach

The idea behind Freecycle is sound. It is an online forum where you can give away unwanted items and not dump them in a landfill site. There are local Freecycles around the world – I've used one in Auckland, New Zealand.

In my case, I've listed items I no longer need in the forum. People who want the items email their interest, arrange a meet up and the item is then given away. There's an alternative approach where people who need things can ask for them.

It sounds simple enough and I've used it to unclutter my garage ahead of a house move, but I've run into a number of problems with Freecycle, which make me question its value.

Problem 1: Can't be bothered. I've offered a number of items on Freecycle, had them requested and then found the person at the other end of the deal fails to pick up the item. I'm guess here that because an item is free, it has little perceived value by the recipient. Maybe there are other reasons. Either way, my first three forays into Freecycle resulted in receivers not picking up the items they had requested from me.

Problem 2: Slackness. This is closely related to problem 1. Receivers make appointments to pick up items, I wait at home for them, they don't turn up. Then they start to mess me around making more broken appointments etc. While  rescheduling is fine, we're talking about people who constantly shuffle appointments. It's rude and, from my point of view, costly.

Problem 3: Greed. I've noticed some of the receivers turning up to pick up items ask for more. In one case the picker-up wandered into my open garage asking if he could take items than were clearly not for recycling. This makes me uneasy with the process. I also don't like it when I offer item X, and get tons of emails asking if I'll also be giving away a loosely related item Y.

Problem 4: Inefficiency. When someone requests an item, I post a taken message on Freecycle. The matter should end there, but emails pour in for days and weeks after, asking if the item is still available. Not taking notice of "Taken" posts is just plain rude.

Problem 5: Venality. Some of the stuff I've distributed via Freecycle has turned up for sale on TradeMe (if you're outside New Zealand this is the local equivalent of eBay). On one level I don't care when happens to the items I've given away. Once they've gone, they've gone. On the other hand, I suspect some Freecycle users are professional scavengers – which disturbs me. Apart from anything else this undermines the idealism of the project.

Have you run into problems with Freecycle? Or are you happy with it? I'd love to hear your opinion.