Over 140 million tons of waste ends up in US landfills each year. That’s why Freecycle has a simple mission: to keep good stuff out of landfills.
“Our mission is to build a worldwide sharing movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources and eases the burden on our landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community,” says founder Deron Beal.
Started as a simple Yahoo! group over two decades ago, Freecycle’s vast volunteer network has spread the organization beyond its founding city of Tucson and into over 5,000 town groups around the globe — gathering up over 11 million global members along the way. Steady word of mouth and a few major shout-outs in national publications, like the New York Times, have only made the organization bigger — and helped communities keep thousands of tons out of landfills each day through reuse and gifting.
“We just kept getting press along the way and incrementally accepting new communities with a new volunteer running each local group,” explains Deron. “So really it's just been a slow process of building up our organization bit by bit.”
With a truly global mission, Freecycle’s team wanted their website to be available to everyone — even those who might not have the money to pay for a monthly subscription or participate in regular charitable giving. That meant the site had to remain free — which meant turning to advertising revenue to help support the site.
