Second hand flea market- recycle your unwanted items
June 01, 2012 By: Amruta Kshemkalyani

Hi tribe, in my pre- zero waste lifestyle, for many years I am on a mission to find out different ways to recycle/reuse unwanted stuff at my home and diverting it from landfills. What to do with our unwanted stuff is a question tackled by many ex-pats living in the UAE. Some of us while going on vacation to the home country or elsewhere even pack and carry their unwanted stuff (which is in good condition) like clothes, electronics, children’s toys, etc and give it away to needy people and charities abroad. I have been doing that for many years now. I also know many people who go to labor camps in the UAE and give away their unwanted stuff. But you can’t give away so many things like ladies’ purses and shoes in these labor camps!

There are many charities in the UAE where you can give away all your stuff right from clothes, books to medicines, spectacles. I have discussed these charities in the UAE in this post.

You can also upcycle many of your unwanted items to create something useful out of them, here are some ideas on reusing and upcycling. But one needs to have enough time and creativity to reuse unwanted stuff.

You find recyclers for papers, plastic waste in UAE (find recycling stations locations here). But we can not really throw readable books to this recycler, I would say it’s insane and of course non-sustainable. When it could be reused, then there is no point in wasting resources to recycle it.
The yard sales concept it not much matured in UAE yet. Also, there are no big permanent second-hand markets here in UAE, like chor bazaars in India.

Many people use sites like souq.com, dubizzle.com, or newspaper classified to resell their unwanted stuff in the UAE. There are others like Take my junk, to help us clean our house from unwanted stuff.
But just recently I found out a very fun-filled as well as a sustainable way to recycle my unwanted good stuff, Second-hand Flea market!

“One man’s waste is another man’s treasure” I really like this sentence, and how it is so true we experienced in this flea market. Many people who want to buy some stuff at cheap, visit this very popular Dubai Flea market, which is organized every month by Green Spot Entertainment. It is organized in Al Safa Park and Uptown Mirdiff. Check out their website.

If you want to sell items they provide you a stall (tables, chairs) at a cost. It’s not cheap, but if you have bulk things in good condition to get rid of, it’s good. You not only get back your cost of setting up stall but you also earn money!

Many times it happens that people are not ready to give away their unwanted stuff like that, for which they paid a good amount of money. Looking at shopping temptations in Dubai, we all face this situation, where we bought some expensive high-end/branded stuff maybe clothes, which are in very good condition but are not fitting now. As we can’t let it go, we keep it and increase our clutter. But when we can sell these kinds of unwanted stuff which is in good condition, we don’t feel that bad. And a good thing is somebody else, who can’t afford to spend the high price for these things, can have it in for cheap.

Not just that I personally started feeling better to buy some stuff second hand, if we want to try 1st time than buying new. Movie and music records are my favorite second-hand things. I still have a mental block on buying any personal second-hand item for hygiene reasons but I would love to find some antique or decorative artistic items in such markets at a good price.

A few days back I had a stall at this Dubai Flea market along with my friends. A week before the market we organized all our unwanted stuff (items strictly in good condition) and decided prices (as low as possible). I am purposely specifying items that we sold in this market, Kid’ toys, shoes, bags, electronics/electrical appliances, utensils, clothes, lamps, books, movie DVDs, jewelry, accessories.

The response was very good. Many taxi drivers, workers bought many items from us at a very cheap rate. Our intent for this market was not to earn money. But we wanted to sincerely get rid of our unwanted but good stuff in return for some small amount. As an example, selling our unwanted branded shirts at 5dhs was definitely a win-win situation for both seller and buyer. By profession none of us sold anything, but selling our stuff in this market was great fun. We also gave away stuff for free. The market was huge with hundreds of stalls under the trees in Safa park and there was a big crowd to buy stuff since early morning.
The second-hand flea market was very good, with no guilt, sustainable business. You get satisfaction from the sort of recycling your stuff by selling it to somebody for a low cost. And the buyers are happy to find good affordable deals and they reuse your unwanted stuff happily.

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