Junk

by Alison Stewart

  And so, it gives people that wouldn’t necessarily be connected into the whole environmental movement an in. It’s like guilt-free. No one says, “you must” or “you shall.” It’s not government telling you anything either, right?

  So, in our original volunteers that we had, just the Tucson group, there was this libertarian guy who was totally like we don’t need government. We can reuse and recycle ourselves, right? There was a former exotic dancer who is now a rancher who’s just into using stuff. There was me and the green, you know, lefty.

  Q: With the business background so you know how to make stuff run.

  Beal: Right, so I know how to make stuff run. And then, the other guy was a prim and proper Republican who is still a member of Rotary. He’s a member of all these professional organizations. He believes in having his tie straight and doing things right and neat. And this totally fits into that, too. And so, we would have potlucks where we’d get together. There’s this disparate group of people come together. And they’re all equally into it in their own way.

  Q: It’s America! But yeah, the attitude, sort of the idea of, We don’t have go out and buy something new, you can find it, you can trade it, you can help somebody else out. I think is very interesting for a place to start. And then you have the other part, people who just want to consume but not pay for it.

  Beal: True. So, it works for both, right? But it’s not just people wanting to consume. It’s really, to me, if you were to—if we had these stats, you’d see these people are extremely low-income, right? And this is a way for them that don’t have a couch to get a couch. So they’re not saying, Gee, I feel like I’m really doing this great thing for the environment. It’s like, Gee, I need a couch and there’s one there and this system works so I’ll use it, right? And that’s, you know, whatever works for them, right?

  Q: Do you have any sort of suggestions, or do the moderators suggest that people don’t sell the stuff? Is that on your system?

  Beal: We don’t have any rules forbidding resale. We just do require that people let people know if they’re picking up that they’re going to resell it. And if someone’s doing resale, it generally does come out because they probably do a lot of stuff. Otherwise it’s not worth it.

  Q: It’s a pretty transparent system. You probably can tell.

  Beal: Yeah. So, your junk comes out pretty quickly. And if they haven’t told the person, then they just get removed from the group or they get told you have to tell people. But we’re not against it. If it keeps it out of the landfill, whatever.

  Q: That’s your main goal, just keeping it out of the landfill? After standing in a landfill, I understand it.

  Beal: Yeah, right, exactly.

  Q: When did you know the whole Freecycle thing was going to work? What was the moment?

  Beal: I got an article in the local newspaper, and we went from, like, thirty or forty—nope, maybe fifty or sixty members—to, like, eight hundred members overnight. And it was just cranking. People were just posting like crazy. And it was already working fine with thirty or forty members because I had tons of stuff to give away. And the warehouse we were in, there’s a second half of a warehouse in the city, at least, to put—they moved their development office somewhere else. And so, there are probably thirty or forty desks and all these cubicle divider things and furniture. And they show up one day with a big semi and they said, “Or we’re hauling it to the landfill.” I’m like, “Give me thirty days. I’ll clear out the rest of the stuff. You won’t have to pay to throw it in a hole.” They’re like, “All right. We can come back in thirty days.” And—

  Q: Gone?

  Beal: Pretty much everything. They didn’t even have to bring a truck, so it was just like leftover bits, right? And we got at least one charter school totally outfitted. It’s City High School downtown, which is a great program for underprivileged kids or kids with issues and stuff.

  Q: Why hasn’t someone done this before? Have you asked yourself that question? I mean, it’s so simple. It’s so direct.

  Beal: Well, the short answer is it was done before. I was talking to a guy who moderated our local group in San Francisco. He said, Yeah, back in the sixties in San Francisco, I was part of it. We set up a storefront for free stuff, free store. And it wasn’t just us. It was us hippies in partnership with Hell’s Angels. Apparently all the drugs that the hippies were getting were run through the Hell’s Angels. So, the Hell’s Angels were pulling down good money, and that was kind of their—they were kind of giving back.

  So, we’re in over 110 countries. We have over five thousand local groups. It’s actually 9.5 million members. And we have about seven thousand volunteers. So, all these homes you’re in still probably won’t cost any money, right? The top thirty leadership volunteers are like the management, and they head up all our groups or approving the groups or work with existing groups or tech teams, they’re all doing like thirty-hour-a-week positions volunteer. Probably 95 percent are women, which is sort of interesting. And so, we have one contractor who’s our engineer and me, and a guy that helps out a couple of hours a week, and that’s it for the largest recycling user website on the planet with 9.5 million members. It’s only possible because you have to pay virtually no one anything.

  Q: Right, people are concerned with their volunteer work.

  Beal: You get a grant here and there and we eke by doing this.

  Q: Actually, it’s funny. Somebody on one of my Facebook pages wanted to know why a guy with your background would use your talents like that. I think that is a compliment. So, why?

  Beal: Well, I did the finance job with all the money and it wasn’t any fun, so there you go. That was easy. And I realized I didn’t need—the whole time I was doing the wealthy finance position that was like three years, I was earning good money. But I was also paying off all my student debt, so I wasn’t living the big life. And, when the debt was paid off I’m like, OK, well, the debt’s paid off. I don’t need any more money. And this is not fun. So, what would inspire me so that when I retire at some point I say, Well, I feel like I really did something that meant something. And so, yeah, that’s what I’ve done.

  Q: I understand that. What are the global differences that you’ve noticed about the way people consume and trade?

  Beal: Well, we’re huge in the UK and virtually nonexistent in Mexico. But you go across the border and you travel in Mexico—like, where was this? This was somewhere on the Baja Peninsula. We went into a shop, and it was a bike shop, and there were all these shiny, new-looking bikes. And then you had a closer look, and they had taken old bikes, fixed them up again, put new tires on and repainted them. So, they had a new bike shop with totally reused bikes. And then you started realizing, well, that’s because they’re not throwing this out. They’re already reusing all this stuff completely. Just because we need a new monitor, they’re not going to throw away the monitor. They may give it to their aunt or a cousin.

  Q: It’s interesting . . . I was looking at the New York Freecycle, and it’s funny what people want to trade. It’s just sort of an interesting snapshot of a mindset.

  Beal: Totally random.

  Q: Random. Two Scrabble holders—and somebody put up a box of steel wool and it went.

  Beal: Yeah, or one that says, “Just dyed my hair black tonight. Maybe it’s your night tonight, too. I’ve got half a bottle left.” It’s like, OK.

  Q: How did you decide what you wouldn’t let people put up?

  Beal: OK, so as a little nonprofit, we’re just struggling to get by. We didn’t have some lawyers to advise us properly of how to set up an organization and how to properly have legal structures in place for each local group. Franchising, legally it’s franchising. We didn’t do that. That’s why we lost our trademark in the US, because we needed franchise agreements with each local volunteer.

  Q: Because you don’t have them, right?

  Beal: Right. And so, then some guy went off and wanted to do his own thing with his little group a
nd sell stuff, and we said, No, you can’t do that. He said, Yes I can. We said, No you can’t. You’re not a Freecycle group anymore. And he sued us, and he won.

  Q: Because . . .

  Beal: We don’t have a franchising. . . . You have to have thousands of dollars’ worth of contracts with each local group, and you have to police each group, like McDonald’s, where they come by and they see what kind of service it is and all that stuff. And, we didn’t have any. There’s no way we could have done any of that.

  Q: Or it didn’t seem like you’d even want to either.

  Beal: We didn’t want to, yeah. There’s not interest, right? So, we still have a registered trademark in EU and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, all the English-speaking countries where we’re biggest due to the limitations on the website.

  Q: Well, it’s hard for you because I think it started, Freecycle started to become like Band-Aid and Kleenex and Xerox. I’m making a Xerox. I need a Kleenex. And, that Band-Aid stinks. Well, that’s not a Band-Aid. It’s a Curad or whatever company. Is it hard for you to keep sort of the quality control?

  Beal: So, just like Xerox, now we’re trying to win back our trademark in the US.

  Q: Funny things you’ve seen?

  Beal: I don’t remember what it was. So, there were some—so, we had one woman gave away her engagement ring. Apparently, she caught the guy cheating, so she gave it away. We had someone else give away a house. It was like a one-hundred-year-old house, but you had to move it. Still, you still see some doublewides and stuff like that. And, a number of cars.

  Q: How do you decide what [to] allow and what to keep off?

  Beal: So, our rules developed organically as we went on. Like, someone said, Can you post a gun? We’re like, No. First we just had one rule: keep it free. Keep it free. That was our first rule. And then someone said, Well, what about illegal substances? I said, OK, keep it free and legal. And then we said, Keep it free, legal, and appropriate for all ages. So, that gave the moderators the power to say no if a guy posts—

  Q: Porn or something?

  Beal: Porn or whatever they’re uncomfortable with, even though it’s legal.

  Q: Why is this different from Craigslist, posting something for free on Craigslist?

  Beal: Well, a lot of people we talk to who use Freecycle can’t stand Craigslist because there’s so much spam crap on there. And so, that’s the one side of it, the negative side, that we don’t have a lot of spam crap on there generally, because we have the local volunteers who take care of the posts and approve members and all that stuff.

  The other is that the sort of sense of community, like the first time I got it on, it was a George Foreman grill. It was actually like a year and a half in. I was so glad to get rid of all this crap, because I had to give away a house full of stuff. But it was a George Foreman grill. I said, Yeah, I’d kind of like that. And so, just on a whim I responded. He said, Yeah, sure, come on over. It turns out the guy lived a block away. I walked down to his house, and they keep chickens. I’m like, How much do you have? And he’s like, So you get to meet somebody. He’s like, Here, have—and he gave me six fresh eggs from his chickens and a George Foreman grill. I was like, How awesome is that? There’s a new neighbor, have a nice walk, there’s fresh eggs.

  Q: Have there been any Freecycle marriages, any Freecycle—do you put that out there, hookups?

  Beal: Um, I think there were a couple. I just don’t remember what they were.

  Q: What about the no-show, the psychology of the no-show. Do you have any insight on why people say they’re going to come and then they don’t?

  Beal: Well, because it’s lame and it doesn’t cost anything not to.

  Q: Is there something about stuff being free that sort of alters the brain chemistry?

  Beal: I totally think so.

  Q: Tell me what you think.

  Beal: Well, I think for some people who are just trying to score a bunch of stuff, they just respond to everything. And they might show up for half of them. And once something has a value of—you know, if you’re paying fifty cents for something, you’re still paying for it, so it has this extra meaning. I’m not going to just throw away fifty cents.

  But if you’re getting it for free, oftentimes there’s little to no impetus for you to actually show up, outside of the respect for the individual who’s waiting for you. And, I avoid all that. . . . I don’t give them my address. I say just give me your mobile phone number. I’ll give you a call and give you directions. See, if it’s just an e-mail address, they’ve got nothing to lose. But if I have their phone number and they don’t show up, they’re going to have a problem.

  Q: That’s a good one. I’m going to give that to a friend because she uses it a lot and she’s sort of getting frustrated by the no-shows.

  Beal: I totally feel for her. I’m pushing hard. We don’t want to have people rate other people just because I don’t like that because all of a sudden you get a bunch of nasty kind of people rating each other back and forth. No, thanks. But we do want to have a checkbox for no-show, and so you can see . . . this is something technical that you can track. The responder posts. You can check the no-show. And you can see how much stuff they’re responding to, just count. Because if this guy’s responded to ten, twenty items in the past week he’s not really interested in mine. So, the number of items responded to in the past week and no-shows, count it. And that way you get it and say, OK, this person has only responded to one thing in the past month, and they’ve always showed up.

  Q: Yeah, that’s smart. You’re going to try to do that, you think?

  Beal: Well, I’ve been saying it for five years, but we don’t have any money. So, I’ve got one engineer who’s basically—right now two of our main servers are down, and so the other two main servers for our database are chugging along frantically trying to catch up. So, it’s like get the water out of the boat.

  Q: Do you have waves of activity?

  Beal: Huge waves. The biggest wave is January first or second.

  Q: Christmas stuff?

  Beal: Because people slow down in the holidays. From Thanksgiving on through Christmas it’s pretty [slow]. So it’s, A, they got behind on all the other stuff they’ve been meaning to post, B, Santa ties.

  Q: Really ugly sweaters and all that kind of stuff?

  Beal: That’s right, yeah. That’s our biggest day each year, January second. And university towns, we see a lot of the hippie Christmas periods where usually when students leave there’s a pile out on the sidewalk. Everyone comes by and says, Oh look, ugly sweater. Well, we’re getting more schools involved in doing that. Over thirty-five thousand items a day are posted on Freecycle, thus kept out of the landfill. And, that’s over one thousand tons a day, which is the equivalent of what a mid-sized landfill gets every day. So it’s one landfill less on the planet. And in the meantime, it’s over fifteen times the height of Mount Everest if you were to stack all that stuff in garbage trucks over the past year alone.

  Q: And it’s stuff. It’s not even garbage because it’s stuff that people would want. It’s not trash.

  Beal: One person’s trash is another person’s treasure, right?

  Q: How do you feel about junk removal companies? Do you have any opinions about those? Like 1-800-GOT-JUNK where they come to your house and take your stuff.

  Beal: I couldn’t care less. If they want crap, take it. If they want good stuff, if they want to make some money off it, why not? Sure. I don’t care.

  Q: How long do you think you’re going to do this? Is this you for the rest of your life?

  Beal: Probably not. These things go in waves. This is—we’ve kind of settled in for the past three or four years at the same level.

  Q: Does it still need you? Does it still need a human being?

  Beal: Yeah.

  Q: Why?

  Beal: Well, the website, we’re shoveling constantly. And so, this website is existing by a Damocles sword thread.

  Q: It seems lik
e it’s such a healthy, vibrant thing.

  Beal: No, it’s just barely—we’ve got probably forty servers going at any given time and one engineer. Now, there’s a startup doing something similar to what we’re doing now. I’m drawing a blank on the name, but I just got an update from them. They have ten staff people, and they have venture capitalists, and I think it’s a $2 million a year budget and four engineers full-time.

  Q: Has any VC approached you, any angel dollars?

  Beal: Well, we’re a charity, so there’s no money.

  Q: So, they just have to give it to you?

  Beal: So, in the beginning they approached us.

  Q: I mean like a Bill Gates saying, “Here’s money!”

  Beal: Right, venture capital and social venture capital. And since we started, when I first started out, I’m like they need to have social venture capital that they track their investments and see how their return on investment is and growth and whatnot. That’d be a great thing. And some people started doing that now. There’s a couple of organizations for social venture capital. Yeah, but I intentionally set it up as a charity because it’s letting go of ownership, right? And so, the same guy that’s two million bucks a year now, I think they’re in their second or third year, they also just said, Well, we’re now up to thirty thousand. Our goal was to reduce consumption overall of new stuff by 20 or 30 percent. Their total per year is thirty thousand items, which is what we do in a day. And that’s $6 million later. That’s more than we will ever spend in the whole existence of our organization. They burn through that in two or three years. That’s why you don’t want to go with venture because they want to grow fast and be big and bring in the bucks. Then they sell it. So we wouldn’t be here anymore if we’d done that. But that’s the beauty of what makes it work, is because people do it because they care.

  V

  HOW CAN YOU USE IT,

  FIX IT, OR LOVE IT?

  13

  JUNK RECYCLERS