Twilio

Earth911.com is a one-stop shop for all you need to know about reducing your impact, reusing what you've got and recycling your trash. With years of experience and industry knowledge, they have the background and resources you need to stay plugged into the green scene. Earth911 was founded in 1991 as a hotline (1-800-CLEANUP) for recycling, and has grown to list over 107K recycling centers today. The 1-800-CLEANUP number now appears on over a billion consumer products, including: Castrol motor oil, Exxon/Mobil motor oil, Valvoline motor oil, Round Up weed killer, and more. Customers across the country rely on 1-800-CLEANUP for information so reliability of that phone system is critical.

Ye Old IVR

When Earth911 was founded, Interaction Voice Response (IVR) systems were big chunks of hardware with lots of blinking lights, huge manuals, and wires everywhere. Before Earth911 discovered Twilio, they had AT&T copper T1s wired into their offices and a DialLogic phone switch. This old beauty ran for 19 years, beginning as the Arizona Oil Recycling Hotline. However, it was not without problems. The legacy IVR system regularly had downtime about every 2 weeks due to AT&T or DialLogic failures resulting in an overall IVR availability of about 96%.

Enter Twilio!

Adam Ballai, one of Earth911's stellar developers (seriously, check out their site, it's pretty awesome) saw Twilio when we launched and re-implemented most of Earth911's existing IVR functionality in 3 hours using PHP. Earth911's website is built on a LAMP (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) platform so integrating Twilio was a snap. When a customer calls Earth911, Twilio makes a request to Earth911's existing web server which in turn returns a simple XML page which renders the same data basic data typically shown to web site visitors except reformatting for Twilio's Say's and Play's.

1-800-CLEANUP Reborn

Earth911's transition to Twilio had the following results.

• A quicker turn-around on new content. New website content is automatically integrated into the IVR.
• It used to take 6 months to integrate new content into the IVR, now it takes less than 24 hours to verify a new recycling center listing and add it to the website and Twilio IVR
• It is now possible to view statistics on usage over time by geography using Twilio Caller ID report and location reporting.
• Earth911 was able to ditch their old copper T1's and focus on what they do best.
• Now leverage Twilio's reliability, they have achieved 100% uptime since launch.

By Why Twilio?

Earth911 had been looking for a replacement for their old IVR for while. They had evaluated various enterprise solutions and had talked to enterprise vendors for several years but never found cost-efficient solution that worked. They even explored building their own open source system but it didn't have the functionality they needed or required too much upfront time or expense.

Twilio provided an easy alternative because it was the fast to deploy, cost effective using a pay-as-you-go model, leveraged their existing in-house web development talents, utilized existing API and PHP code, and was hosted so Earth911 could focus on maintaining the largest database of recycling centers in the US and not on time-consuming and arcane telecom problems.

Call 1-800-CLEANUP and hear the difference yourself

Earth911 Partners

Earth911 syndicates environmental content to MSN Green Search Engine, Yahoo, Google, Cox, others