Deron Beal - Agenda Setters 2009

Name: Deron Beal

Title: Freecycle founder

Position: 36    Last year: Not ranked

Why? Bringing reduce/reuse/recycle to the web

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• Stephen Fry
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• Mike Lynch

The Freecycle Network began life more than six years ago as a single email sent by founder and current executive director Deron Beal to a handful of friends and not-for-profits in the US. Today the not-for-profit organisation has more than seven million members in more than 90 countries, all giving and receiving other people's unwanted items via local Freecycle email groups - and meeting their neighbours in the process.

The founding tenet of Freecycle is that reusing is even better for the environment than recycling and Beal's idea of harnessing the web to facilitate reuse has clearly been a winner, albeit not for the local newspaper classified pages. Beal's success has been "gently introducing the developed world to the joys of swapping stuff", as one panellist puts it.

Agenda Setters judges commended him for this simple yet effective vision - and for demonstrating new potentials for networking. Another panellist also pointed out Freecycle is something of a refreshing alternative to the "highly disposable" tech world - showing "millions another way to acquire".

Prior to Freecycle, Beal worked in conservation and local development, including a not-for-profit community development organisation and a conservation group. Forty-two-year old Beal has a BS in Foreign Service and an MBA in International Management.