WHEN TRAVENA Law Ching-man and her family moved to Ho Man Tin, they faced a problem many people are familiar with - they had too many possessions. 'I ordered furniture for my new home,' says Law, a housewife. 'So I couldn't accommodate much of the old stuff.' It was her family's third move, so Law was familiar with the routine; she would ask the movers to haul the unwanted items to the nearest rubbish collection station. But this time the movers suggested an alternative: they advised her to contact Crossroads International, a charity that collects unwanted items and finds homes for them among the needy in Hong Kong and worldwide. When an adult education institute in Kunming, Yunnan, needed a photocopier, the organisation provided one from a local firm that had moved. When an orphanage on Hainan needed to furnish accommodation for staff, it looked to Crossroads, which shipped furniture donated by a landlord in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's problems with excess are so bad that some residents even pay to get rid of their unwanted goods, as some find it too much of a bother to put up a notice and wait for responses. As a result, a significant portion of articles in good condition wind up in the city's overtaxed landfills. But, as Law has discovered, redundant items can be recycled or put to good use with a simple call to one of several non-profit organisations or charities. Many groups will find a new home for items in good condition and repair broken equipment. Depending on what is being donated, they may even send someone to pick it up from your home. What Law gave away could easily furnish a home: two sofas, a table with six chairs, two small beds, shelves, a shoe cabinet, a green outdoor carpet and lawn furniture. 'I've moved quite a few times and this is the first time I've donated what I didn't want to take with me,' she says. She was also quick to tell friends about her new find. An advertising company her husband works with will donate their current computer monitors to the Crossroads programme when they replace them with flat-panel models in the New Year. And her landlord now knows what to do with old furnishings from his flats. 'When he asked me to help him dispose of some old furniture, I suggested he should donate it instead,' Law says. 'So we pooled our stuff to have it all picked up.' Many organisations from Oxfam to Friends of the Earth deal with one of the most common items to be thrown out: clothing. Clothes collected typically go to those who need them, provided they're in good condition. The rest is turned into rags for industrial use. Cooking equipment and dishware can easily find new homes through Christian charities such as the Salvation Army. Dog lovers can help make a canine friend more comfortable by donating old blankets, sheets and towels to Hong Kong Dog Rescue, which houses 60 to 70 dogs at its Pok Fu Lam kennels. 'We turn it into dog bedding,' says organiser Sally Andersen. The items are bleached and disinfected before being given to the dogs. 'We go through quite a lot because some dogs like to tear it up.' While Crossroads accepts only items in good shape, other groups turn your trash into treasure for someone else's use. St James' Settlement, for example, collects used electrical appliances, working or otherwise, for two of its programmes. As the name suggests, its Electrical Appliances for the Elderly scheme provides the aged with items they can't afford. Volunteers pick up unwanted appliances and takes them to St James' offices where they're cleaned before being delivered to an elderly person's home. Appliances in disrepair become part of the charity's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment scheme, which is run at the invitation of the Environmental Protection Department. St James' full-time service workers fix them before they're either sold, or given to the elderly scheme. Gadgets beyond repair are dismantled and sold off to recycling firms. Proceeds help support their other programmes. 'We must make sure all appliances donated to elderly citizens are in good condition,' says St James' senior manager Josephine Lee Yuk-chi. 'That's because we want to ensure the safety of the user and because, if there are any problems with it, we will go to the person's house to fix it.' The charity received about 20,000 electrical items last year, 6,000 of which went to its scheme for the elderly, and the rest were repaired or sold for scrap. However, appliances such as microwave ovens aren't accepted because 'many elderly people don't know how to work them', says Chan Ping-lun, who manages the programme. That's why computers and peripheral equipment are best donated to other schemes, he says. When banker Eric Thompson bought a new computer last month, he found an alternative way to dispose of his old machine. 'At first, I wanted to sell my old system,' says the 35-year-old Canadian. 'But when I went to list it online I thought, 'Well, I'll do a quick search for recycling used computers in Hong Kong'.' As he discovered, Caritas was happy to take his old system off his hands for a scheme to refurbish and recycle used computer equipment, similar to St James' appliance plan. The equipment is also used to give poorly educated young people hands-on training in repairing computer hardware and software, under a programme sponsored by the Social Welfare Department. Meanwhile, the Friends of the Earth not only offers sage advice for more environmentally friendly computer practices. Thompson learned that the group helps recycle used printer cartridges and storage disks. The discovery has given him ideas for recycling other items. 'I have a stack of old scratched CDs I haven't looked at in years. You know, even though they're plastic, we don't think about recycling CDs.' According to Friends of the Earth, printer cartridges can be refilled and reused instead of being thrown away. The group has collected and reprocessed 19,000 used cartridges since 1999 through its recycling programme, says spokesperson Hahn Chu Hon-cheung. And since it takes more than half a litre of petrol to make a cartridge, Chu says that's equivalent to saving 10,800 litres of petrol. The green group also runs a programme for recycling another byproduct of the festive season: expanded polystyrene, or EPS, popularly used as packing material. The group estimates more than 100 tonnes of non-degradable EPS waste makes its way to the landfills every day, equivalent to 100 double-decker buses. Like Thompson, Law had thought about selling some of the furniture from her previous home but decided it was more useful to donate. 'Selling all these things would take a lot of time and wouldn't be very meaningful,' she says.