MEDIA RELEASE 2013.04.29
For immediate release – 29 April, 2013
For more information and to schedule interviews and photographs,
here is how to contact us.
May 1, 2013, Tucson, Arizona – The confetti is flying as The Freecycle Network celebrates its tenth birthday on May Day, 2013! Freecycle.org has grown from one little gifting group in Tucson, Arizona to a global web community in over 5,000 communities on every continent in the world. Freecycle founder, Deron Beal, expresses amazement at this phenomenal growth: “I can’t believe that Freecycle.org has become the biggest recycling and re-use web community on the planet! That we’ve been able to achieve this as a nonprofit with very little means but with the commitment of thousands of globally local volunteers is beyond amazing.”
May 1st, 2003 was a different world, a different decade. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was finishing up high school and twitter was the sound of a happy bird in springtime. And founder Deron Beal was being told that Goodwill doesn’t take beds and that he’d have to take it to the landfill and throw it in a hole that we taxpayers had paid to dig in the first place. That was impetus enough to set up the first Freecycle group in Tucson with thirty friends and a handful of nonprofits.
Now, The Freecycle Network is proudly fanning the flames of the grassroots wildfire across the globe as the largest environmental web community on the planet as it raced past the 9.3 million member mark, with growth in more than 110 countries. This translates into over 32,000 items a day, which is over a thousand tons a day kept out of landfills via gifting and re-use. Our members are currently gifting used items in over 5,000 local communities.
Now there are about 7,000 volunteers who devote their time and energy to this worthy cause. TFN thanks all of their wonderful members and volunteers who, they cite, are the reason for their overwhelming success. TFN says if people weren’t basically good and giving, Freecycle would not work. But it does indeed on a massive, and globally local, scale. Freecycle creates a circle of giving in each of its local communities around the world. Working together, we can keep it green.
The Network is currently growing at the rate of over ten to twenty thousand members a week. This nonprofit gifting movement enables individuals to gift items in their local communities rather than to throw them away enabling us as a web community to keep the equivalent of an entire landfill in circulation rather then being discarded. Freecycle was ranked by Yahoo as the third most searched environmental term on the planet following only “global warming” and “recycling.”
Lending credence to their motto of “changing the world one gift at time,” the amount of items gifted in the past year is the equivalent of over fifteen times the height of Mt. Everest when stacked in garbage trucks – that’s over 700 million pounds of used items. We just topped the 50 millionth item in time for our tenth anniversary as well!
We’ll be celebrating and giving out prizes on May First on our Facebook page. We’ll also be rolling out a new, informative wiki on Freecycle.org. Finally, we are rolling out a new anime promotional video donated by THDanimation.com; it’ll be rolled out on our Facebook page and under “About Us” on Freecycle.org
Freecycle is globally local -- Each city has volunteer moderators and a unique email group. Anyone living in that city is then welcome to post items to be given away or to seek items which they might be able to use. Whether it is an old door, a pile of dirt or a computer, it’s probably being given away on one of the local groups already up and running as you read this article.
The Freecycle Network is a private, nonprofit organization based out of Tucson, Arizona, and stewarded by a volunteer near you. Visit www.freecycle.org to find the Freecycle community in your area.
Liberate a basement near you and keep usable items out of the landfill in the process! Keep the cycle of giving and reuse going in your local Freecycle group. Happy tenth birthday, Freecycle!
Here is how to contact us if you wish to arrange a photo opportunity or interview with your local moderator..
The Freecycle Network
P.O. Box 294
Tucson, AZ 85702
www.freecycle.org
~changing the world one gift at a time~
