People trading junk through Internet site

The idea began as a way of reducing the amount of trash going into landfills.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Bill Heeter admits he has a problem: He loves junk.
But the retired businessman is among a growing number of packrats going online to give away their clutter -- or to take some off others' hoarding hands.
In less than two years, freecycling has caught on worldwide, with about 500,000 givers and takers of everything from couches to cars and pingpong tables to pianos.
A few months ago, Heeter visited www.freecycle.org and joined the online community.
Heeter's biggest problem was books. A thousand or more titles from an Internet textbook selling endeavor piled high in his suburban Kansas City garage.
He offered the books through the freecycling network for anyone to take, and nearly 3,000 freecyclers in and around Kansas City got an e-mail relayed through the Web site. The same day a woman replied and offered to take all the books to sell at a church garage sale.
"I thought, 'Where has this been?' I've been purging junk for years and never questioned if it'd be useful to someone else," said Heeter, 41. "I can see myself freecycling forever. Our garage will never be like that again."
With his garage cleared, Heeter had space for a lawnmower and a leaf blower. He got those free from fellow freecyclers.
How this began
Since discovering the "virtual curb," Heeter and his wife have been cleaning out closets and offering more stuff to the free message group hosted by Yahoo. His son gave his unused Pokemon toys to a younger child through freecycling.
Deron Beal started the grass-roots movement in May 2003 in Tucson, Ariz., to slow the growing landfills in his community. The idea has scattered through cyberspace and word of mouth to about 1,500 cities worldwide.
There are freecyclers in Australia and Alaska. Portland, Ore., has the largest freecycling group with about 10,000 members. About 300 people freecycle in Manhattan, Kan., with the same number in Jefferson City, Mo. Every participating city has a local volunteer to manage the group.
Shane Brady and his girlfriend, Kelly Garbato, started the Kansas City freecycling group last September. In a year, membership has grown to 3,000 members.
About 20 new people sign up each day in Kansas City alone, and the couple volunteers two hours or more moderating daily activity. They also participate. Brady picked up a slightly used poker table soon after he launched www.kcfreecycle.org.
Lots of traffic
Messages are sent by the thousands each month offering unneeded items or placing wanted ads. But there are a few rules, Brady said. Guns, pets and medication can't be freecycled, for example.
"A lot of the things that are shared would probably end up in a landfill otherwise," Brady said. "Maybe for that reason people enjoy giving more than taking."
"Internet communities like freecycling serve a practical and emotional purpose and the Internet lets us bring these like-minded people together quickly," said Mary Chayko, a sociology professor at the College of Saint Elizabeth in New Jersey, who started researching Internet communities the late 1990s.
Her 2002 book "Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age," explored why and how people connect on the Internet.
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