I created “Attention, Garbage Truck is Coming!” in 2013. The window of my small apartment in the beautiful Saska Kępa district of Warsaw looked out directly onto the trash bins. Saska Kępa is an old district with a long history; many elderly people live there, and antiques from the interwar period and the communist era often turned up by the bins.
I hate throwing things away. I always try to find some new use for things that are no longer needed. Given the size of my apartment, I didn’t have much room to work with. So I decided to share information instead. It turned out there were not only people willing to rescue these items, but also others eager to share their own finds.
That’s how the first “Attention, Garbage Truck is Coming!” page came to be – a place where people could post that something worth saving had been left by the bins. Pages for other cities followed. The first volunteers appeared, eager to help rescue things from the landfill. As the number of posts grew, it became clear that a Facebook page wasn’t the right format anymore – sharing posts simply took too long. In 2015, a Facebook group for Warsaw was created, along with groups for other cities, where anyone could share posts visible to the whole group. This also broadened the scope of what we did, since group members wanted to offer and request not just furniture, but other items too – not only from the bins, but from their own homes as well.
In 2022, with the support of Ashoka Poland, the “Attention, Garbage Truck is Coming!” Foundation was established to support the community of volunteers – the group administrators – and to change the way unwanted items are managed in Poland. The whole initiative keeps evolving and keeps surprising me with new situations.
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Dominika Szaciłło
