Kudos to Great Glebe Garage Sale GGGS leftovers escape landfill

By Katie Fice

I recently caught up with Della Wilkinson, chair of the Glebe Community Association (GCA) Environment Committee, about this year’s Great Glebe Garage Sale. Ever since her first GGGS in 1991, Wilkinson has relished the fact that the sale is a great way to keep quality items out of the landfill. With the garage sale back in person this year and looking more like its pre-pandemic self, this was again possible.

Before this year’s sale, committee members discussed ways to do even more to prevent “leftovers” from going to into the garbage. They decided to create a flyer that listed local charities willing to accept donations of many different items. It was intended to encourage sellers to take unsold items to charities to help those in need.

This initiative was a collaboration between Wilkinson and Kate Reekie from the GCA Environment Committee, GNAG and City staff at the Glebe Community Centre, with input from Martha Tobin of Declutter4Good.

The City of Ottawa generously printed the flyers, which were handed out on the morning of the sale. The team engaged with vendors at the GCC and in the surrounding neighbourhood, handing out flyers and encouraging them to pass on their unsold items to those in need rather than sending them to the landfill.

The team reports a terrific response from vendors who were delighted to receive this information. Wilkinson kindly volunteered to remove leftover items from the GCC at the end of the day – there were only two small boxes of items, far fewer leftovers than usual. Those boxes were given to Diabetes Canada.

This initiative was a great way to help reduce waste generated at the Great Glebe Garage Sale. We hope this list can be used for future sales and other similar events.

If you’ve been making efforts to reduce your waste, we may feature you in a future column. Please send a short paragraph explaining how you are reducing your household or business waste to environment@glebeca.ca, attention Katie.

Conscious of her own waste footprint, Katie Fice joined the GCA Zero Waste Committee (a subcommittee of the Environment Committee) to learn more about waste reduction and to help raise awareness of changes in daily living that can have a positive impact on the environment.