Small-sized women’s clothing is eagerly desired by Hispanic social service organizations.

Take any books on alcohol or drug recovery to your local Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous chapter or to your nearest recovery organization.

Surplus garden produce that the food bank won’t take can be given to battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, or to halfway houses or residential programs for educable mentally retarded or other special-needs people.

Ask about exercise equipment at HUD housing for low-income elderly folks. Many of these places have exercise rooms, as do more than a few senior citizen’s centers in cities.

If and when all else fails, put an ad in the local shopper paper for a “load of flea market merchandise”. If it’s priced at a quarter or less of its total used value, you should sell it pretty fast.

My parents’ house is absolutely overflowing with books, many of which have only been read once.

There’s a new startup company that has an innovative shared-use model for books that could reduce clutter while eliminating the problem of expending time, effort and gasoline going around trying to find someplace to take your used books.

The service is called BookSwim (http://www.bookswim.com). I’ll be profiling them on my site this coming Friday.

- Aaron Dalton, 1GreenProduct.com

Goodwill & Value Village sell the clothes they don’t want to rag dealers for X dollars a pound. Most of that money goes to the charities that they nominally support. Ironically and tragically, half of the time anything that is actually vintage — from the 1930′s-1960′s — is usually tossed, because these stores often don’t recognize its value.

But rag factories themselves sort & package the stuff they sell — some to make rags with, some to resell overseas. At least in Toronto, local vintage store owners go in and pick in the factories, buying clothing by the pound, meaning that grandma’s Pringle cashmere sweaters won’t get felted after all.

But if you do have a stash of really outdated clothes in good shape, bear in mind that they’re not trash, even if no-one wants them. Sell them to a vintage dealer or at very least on Ebay.

If you are in Bostonland, check out Got Books at http://www.gotbooks.com/contact_us.php

They pick up (!!!) and then donate to the appropriate school or charity.

When my wife and I moved in late March from a very spacious apartment to one less than half its size, they were more than happy to take an incredible amount of our things, from dishes to clothes to an entire dining room set. They have reasonable restrictions on what they won’t take, but anything else to them is fair game.

I think people donate trash because they remember what it was like when it was new and they made a “connection” with it (enough to choose to buy it). Their perception of the item is colored by their memory of it as a brand new thing. Even after the item wears out, the connection remains and they don’t see it as junk.

For more info on the White Elephant Shop, check them out here: http://www.childrensmemorial.o.....e_ele.aspx

I think the solution is to take those unusable things and put on freecycle – and then you will be able to offer your things that are unusable for their intended purpose – to people who can use them for other purposes.

Also, in response to outdated or moldy books, dirty clothing…isn’t there always recycling? Books are made of paper – hello? Recycle them. Dirty, torn clothes? Send to rag dealer. Broken appliances or electronics? Offer them for parts or recycle them. My community has an electronics recycling program.

In my opinion, there is really very little that actually deserves to go to a landfill. And that IS the point, right?

Thanks!