Kidlington & Woodstock Freecycling Group allows you to freecycle your unwanted items and declutter your home. The main rule of the group is keep it free, legal and suitable for all ages. This group is for people in and around Kidlington & Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. This includes Cassington, Yarnton, Begbroke, Bletchindon, Kirtlington, Hampton Poyle, Hampton Gay, Long Hanborough, Shipton-on-Cherwell, Weston-on-the-Green, Islip etc - and even Oxford!

Wednesday 21 November 2007

Please support your LOCAL freecycling group

Here in Kidlington we are increasingly proud of our group. It starts, like all such groups in a small way, but is growing steadily. Many groups discourage members joining who do not live locally. That is not our policy.

We take the view that some people may wish to join our group because they work in the area, or even have relations who live here and perhaps those relations do not have access to the Internet.

Whatever the case we work hard to ensure that when an item is offered that both the person potentially taking that item and the offerer consider travel costs as part of the equation. There seems little point in spending a couple of pounds worth of petrol in a car, never mind the maintenance, and any associated ecology downsides such as carbon emissions, noise pollution etc if the item to be collected does not justify the journey.

If the journey is a "local" one then of course such issues pale into insignificance, and that is the main reason we ask people to add their location (a village name or the first 3 characters of your postcode) at the end of the subject.

This of course is only a guideline. Neither do we, nor do we wish to enforce this guideline. We leave it up to the offerer and the taker to decide in their own minds whether such issues are relevant and how important they are.

If you are concerned about travelling then we recommend you might also wish to consider joining other local groups. To the north we have Cherwell Valley group, to the south we have Oxford group, to the west we have the Witney group and to the east we have Bicester group.

Reflections over the River Cherwell

As the winter draws near and we have ever darkening skies I thought I would try to brighten us all up with a picture of the River Cherwell from the water meadows which I took over the summer whilst walking to Thrupp.

Will the lorries ever stop?

In my post Wasting our Countryside I reported that plans were afoot to turn the silo at the where the road between Oxford and Kidlington crosses the A34 (by the Water Eaton Park and Ride) into a waste recycling plant. You never get something for nothing in this life, and a Malcolm Baker of Long Hanborough has pointed to the increase in the number of lorries coming and going from that junction could rise by 372 per day. If that is the case that means almost one per minute, over say an 8 hour day. That figure is staggering and would turn the junction into a complete nightmare blockage of an already over-stressed part of Oxford's clogged up road system. (Malcolm, if you are reading this blog then please can you verify the number of lorries etc.)