Following in the grand traditions of Hoover and Google, these days Freegle can lay proud claim to being both verb and adjective alongside its humble proper noun beginnings.

For those Sussex residents who aren’t numbered among the 50,000 Freegle members in the county, the group is a free online “gifting” service: people who have stuff to get rid of offer it to the group, and those who can make use of it come and get it. Anything from shelves, desks, magazines, left-over veggie soup and even a blind parrot have found themselves up for grabs on the giant online swap shop.

There are no statistics for how much stuff has been kept out of landfill through the service, but the impact of the group was described as “immeasurable” by judges at the 2010 Sussex Eco Award. Volunteers from the group in Brighton are also working with the Government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) to find an accurate way of measuring the economic, environmental and social impact of Freegling.

The woman responsible for so much give and take is Cat Fletcher, winner of volunteer of the year at the Eco Awards. She describes herself as “an ordinary working mum with three teenagers”.

Originally from Sydney, Australia, she moved to Sussex in 1992 and found herself horrified at the lack of recycling facilities and shocked at how little information or knowledge there was around the problems of waste.

Her unhappiness with the construction of the Newhaven incinerator led her to think, “It’s better to be part of the solution rather than add to the problems”.

As a result, she has both run and publicised the Sussex Freegle group since 2007.

Prior to 2009, Freegle was known as Freecycle, a group performing exactly the same function but which stressful internal politics caused to collapse.

Cat was integral in setting up the new Freegle network, which rapidly found itself with 252 local reuse groups across the UK. She is an elected national representative, helping to manage and maintain the needs of some 1.1 million members countrywide alongside her responsibilities to the Sussex Freegle community.

Her work with the Sussex group involves a lot of computer time, mostly going through the hundreds of messages received every week and moderating them: ensuring they make sense, are in an easily readable format and that no one is offering anything illegal or otherwise suspicious.

But her efforts have created ripples much further afield. Cat says: “I’ve got the concept of ‘local free giving’ featured on mainstream TV, local and regional radio, in local, national and international newspapers and magazines, and on every imaginable online site.”

She’s currently working with Lewes Priory School on dealing with their waste, and a national energy company, although she won’t say which one.

Her work has led her to set up a nationwide Freegle group for music festival-goers, more of which we can expect to hear about at the beginning of next year’s festival season.

Perhaps most excitingly, however, a presentation at the National Recycling Waste Management Conference earlier this year has raised her hopes of “inspiring local authority managers, corporate strategic planners and government officials to embrace and support community reuse initiatives like Freegle Sussex. So we won’t need to build more incinerators in the future!”

* www.ilovefreegle.org

* http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/greencyclesussex/