Jan. 5, 2009
By Joe Truini
Wrangling in recyclers: Blogger to create nationwide recycling search engine

Out of the West, er, Southeast, RecycleBill is riding into town on a cloud of dust to save recycling.

Overdramatic? Certainly. But Billy Jones, the manager of SalvageAmerica.us, a Greensboro, N.C., construction and demolition debris and scrap metal recycler, has a plan to get people excited about recycling.

"Like most scrap dealers, our company is finding the current market to be very tough, so I started thinking about new ways to find new business," Jones said. "What I found is a way to help the entire recycling industry at no cost to consumers, small businesses or the recycling industry."

He is so pumped about his plan that he´s giving up more than eight years of work and 80,000 bloggers to pursue it. You see, Jones is widely known as Billy The Blogging Poet and considered by some as one of the most well-known poetry bloggers in the world. He´s even published four books.

"I´m so excited about this venture that I chucked over eight years and 80,000 monthly readers of the musings, rants and poetry of Billy The Blogging Poet and reinvented myself as RecycleBill," Jones said. "I´m looking at ways to combine my passions for writing and the stuff I do for the environment."

Jones´ new venture is to create a nationwide search engine at www.recyclebills.com that will direct consumers to local recyclers that actually will pay for post-consumer recyclables. Recyclers can list themselves for free, and there is no cost to the consumers.

"My goal is to help consumers find their local recyclers, spread awareness of the need to continue recycling even in hard times and perhaps entertain and enlighten through the use of RecycleBill´s Recycleblog," he said. "There´re lots of places where you find recyclersà but you´ll call maybe a hundred people to find a place that actually buys something."

This is the first step in a larger project Jones is planning that will help the recycling industry as a whole, he said. Though, he couldn´t share the details of the master plan.

"If I can pull off the directory first, then the next step is going to be à I really don´t want to say what the next step is," he said. "It´s going to be a very different approach to getting consumers to recycle. I think I´ve stumbled across something."

Jones´ -- sorry -- RecycleBill´s plan will even encourage businesses and consumers who would not recycle otherwise.

"What I do next will be really big," he said.

Contact Waste & Recycling News reporter Joe Truini at (330) 865-6166 or jtruini@crain.com