We are honored to announce that we are nominated for a Green America’s People & Planet Award!

Here is an exclusive look straight from the website. [www.greenamerica.com]

Be sure to CLICK HERE to vote for us in the category of Green Business!

repurposedMATERIALS
Denver, CO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have helped corporate America divert nearly 2,000,000 pounds of waste from the landfill through “repurposing.”

re·pur·posed·MA·TE·RI·ALS  (noun) Byproducts and waste that have value “as is” to a second, unrelated industry.  (See fun examples below)

I’d like to give a quick primer on our company.  Our company is focused on the creative re-use side of the famous three-sided reduce, re-use, recycle arrowed triangle.  repurposedMATERIALS is the only company in America whose entire product line is made of “repurposed” items.

What is “repurposing?”  Repurposing IS creative Reuse. It is NOT recycling that has gotten all the buzz since the 1970s.  Remember, recycling requires huge amounts of energy to melt, grind, chip, or shred a waste stream into a useable feedstock to be used as a raw material to manufacture something new.  With “repurposing”, we deal with byproducts and waste that get a second life because they have value “as is.”

Our customers often ask, “does ‘repurposing’ make more sense economically or environmentally?”  We feel it makes incredible sense both ways.

Here are some examples of “repurposed” products to get you thinking…

Advertising Billboards repurposed as tarps for equipment, materials, etc.
Scrap Conveyor Belting repurposed as protective mats, etc.
Rubber Roofing Membrane repurposed as heavy-duty weed barriers, pond liners, etc.
Super Sacks repurposed as waste and debris containers, etc. 
Filter Cloths repurposed as tough, yard debris tarps
275 gal Totes repurposed as water tanks, fire fighting rigs, etc.

 

Keep on repurposing!

 

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Test Top Repurposing Project

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Test for New Arrivals

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One of Damon Carson’s customers recently told him, “You’re really just a professional dumpster diver, aren’t you?”

Carson took it as a compliment. “I’ve been called a lot of things: Dr. Junk, dumpster jockey, trash wizard. It doesn’t matter, as long as they know I’ve got what they need,” he says.

The founder and owner of Repurposed Materials Inc., Denver, Carson buys by-products from industries across the country and sells them for a different use. At the company’s half-acre storage yard in northern Denver, his hundreds of “junk treasures” include rolls of fire hose, vinyl from billboards, rubber roofing membrane, elevator cables, oak wine barrels, artificial turf, old climbing rope, swimming-pool covers and, from Wyoming, snow fences.

“We don’t recycle. There’s no chipping and grinding going on here,” Carson says. “We repurpose. We buy it and sell it as is. No warranties or guarantees. Our customers come up with all kinds of creative reuses for these products.”

Carson says landscapers use the rubber roofing membrane for pond liners, while other customers repurpose burlap coffee sacks for sandbags, ground cover or as protection for curing concrete. The fire hose has been employed as a boat-dock bumper, an irrigation hose and as part of a zoo’s monkey exhibit. Climbing rope from city recreation centers works well for bundling, taglines or tying down loads. The billboard vinyl is used as a tarp to cover material on jobsites.

However, Carson says he is not buying and selling random construction or demolition waste. “We look for highly engineered, quality products that come in uniform lengths and sizes,” he says. “Versatility of reuse is key for us. I probably wouldn’t buy 50 toilets from an old apartment building because it’s less easy to repurpose them than roofing tiles.”

One of Carson’s newest clients is Brad Licht, owner of Licht Renovation LLC, Denver, a residential contractor who bought about 1,000 linear ft of snow fence to panel a custom-made basketball court in Greenwood Village, Colo.

“We were going to use cedar on the job, but it’s expensive, and the rustic quality of the snow fence actually fits better with the home’s European country design,” Licht says. “Plus, it adds to the sustainable nature of the project.”

Drew Nichols, owner of Nichols Design and Construction, a custom homebuilder in Fort Collins, Colo., bought some polyiso roofing insulation from Carson’s company for about half the cost of new insulation. He used it to insulate underneath concrete slabs in a new home. “I saved about $300 to $400. Also, it’s important to us to keep waste out of the landfill,” Nichols says.

No Grand Vision

Carson, 40, a Kansas native, came to Colorado after college for the skiing and started his own trash-hauling firm, which served the mountain resort towns until it was bought by a larger firm. He says he founded Repurposed Materials in September 2010 with “zero grand vision.” After I sold my first company, I had a family to feed, so I did what I knew. I started bird-dogging by-products, asking people what they need and could use,” he says.

An admitted trade-magazine junkie, Carson says he studies the stories and ads for new products. “I try to find parallels out there in products that have outlived their original life spans,” he says.

“I soon became a mini-expert in by-products no one else seemed to want,” he says. He started by buying billboard vinyl, then created a website, www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com. His weekly e-newsletter now updates about 25,000 U.S. customers on his latest finds. Carson hires a new person every other month—he has hired eight employees in the firm’s first 18 months—and he wants to expand his materials yard. He says the firm should achieve seven-figure revenue by the end of 2012.

“This is very much a lean, interactive business,” he says. “It’s like an industrial thrift store. We buy in small quantities at first, our customers do the R&D [repurpose and development] for us, and we get to be about as green as you can get.”

Original Article written by Mike Shaw courtesy of Engineering News-Record. Visit their website at ENR.com.

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With a motto like “Repurposing and reusing waste and byproducts of industry,” you know this company is as green as it gets. Unlike most recycled materials, however, the products sold through Repurposed Materials come ready to use, just the way they are.

Interestingly enough, one of the company’s products is huge sheets of repurposed billboard advertising vinyl in 20 mil thickness, the very dimension used in swimming pool liners.

Which begs the question: could the colorful billboard vinyl become pool liner vinyl? We’ll leave that question to the industry’s green-minded entrepreneurs.

“The vinyls are in surprisingly good and consistent quality for being a used material,” founder Damon Carson says.

Original Article written by AQUA editors at AQUA Magazine.

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Some new start-up landscape companies are building their business by being ‘green’. They offer their clients organic or systemic fertilizers, weed controls sans chemicals, biological insect controls, battery-operated lawn mowers, etc. In fact, some conventional landscape contractors have jumped on this bandwagon. They offer this same type of service to clients who request to be ecologically compliant. More importantly, they are willing to pay for it.

Now, you can take being ecofriendly to an even higher level.

Thanks to Denver, Colorado-based Repurposed Materials, Inc., landscape contractors can find recycled materials to use and save a bunch of money in the process. How much money? Often, 50 to 75 percent over the cost of buying new, says company founder and president Damon Carson.

Repurposed Materials does what its name implies.

It finds industrial and marketing materials that would otherwise end up in the landfill, and repurposes them at low cost to the landscaping contractor. For example, imagine that you pass a roadside billboard for a 2011 President’s Day Sale on your way to work. Billboard art is pre-printed on stretched, flexible, weatherproof vinyl, which is then attached to the billboard scaffolding. As for that President’s Day Sale vinyl, it’s useless after the holiday. In the olden days, it would have been discarded, though the vinyl itself still had plenty of strength and durability.

Now, you can buy that vinyl.

“That stretchy vinyl makes a lowcost drop-cloth for lawn work, or to protect shrubbery during spraying,” says Carson. “It can be used to gather and tie-up lawn clippings and trimmings. It can even be a foul weather equipment tarp.”

Among its biggest sellers are used rubber roofing membranes. If you’re installing a pond and need a long, broad lining, Carson can sell you these membranes. Then, you’d apply waterproof adhesive to bind several membranes together. Voilà—you have a low-cost, highly functional pond or weed liner.

Recently, the company began to sell huge burlap bags that once were used for coffee. “Landscape contractors use them as weed barriers and in retaining walls,” says company CEO Dan Crease. Another product that works well for landscape contractors are ropes. Repurposed Materials, Inc. offers a variety of used rope for sale.

“The landscape industry has some of the most creative people I know when it comes to solving problems with whatever materials are at hand,” said Carson. “That’s why I think the landscape market is so receptive to these byproducts of industry. The materials are versatile and generic enough to be repurposed in all kinds of useful ways. Our customers prove every single day that good old American ingenuity is alive and well.”

There’s more. Carson repurposes empty 275-gallon water totes that can be used as an on-the-job water tank, or waste oil collector.

Actually, “repurposing” has been a going business for decades. Wine barrels destined for the dump get cut in half to make backyard planters, while old railroad ties are used in retaining walls and gardens (though plants hate the ones that have been soaked in creosote).

“Damon is the bird-dogger,” says Crease. “He’s out there calling on businesses, looking to see what’s waste to them. It could be gold to you.” Recycled products are as good as new, but cheaper than new. Sounds like a good way for everyone to go “green.”

Original Article written by Irrigation and Green Industry Magazine.

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Video by CCTv News via reporter Steve Mort

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One Man’s Used Vinyl Billboard…

Consider the giant vinyl billboard advertisement. It’s created for some fleeting movie or fast food promotion and then thrown away. But that’s not just an consumerism bummer; it’s also a business opportunity.

Colorado resident Damon Carson bought 20 old vinyl billboards for $140 when an acquaintance suggested they could be used as drop cloths for painting. With durable, waterproof vinyl to spare, he put out some feelers to see if there was a market for the stuff. And there was. “I then quickly had to start bringing them in from around the nation to keep up with demand,” he says.

When one of his billboard customers asked about rubber products, and Carson started repurposing old conveyor belt material, he had his second product line and a new company, Repurposed Materials.

Now about a year old, Denver-based Repurposed Materials is giving new life to a wide variety of industrial by-products. Used wine barrels are resold as planters. Strips of rubber from old conveyor belts are resold as truck bed lining. Old street sweeper brushes are resold as back scratchers for livestock.

The environmental benefits of Carson’s business are obvious. Every year, 7.6 billion tons of nonhazardous industrial trash ends up in landfills. Each billboard or wine barrel Carson repurposes is another that doesn’t get tossed.

This article re-posted by Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs.  Original Article by Andrew Price, found at Fast CoExist, part of the Fast Company Magazine.

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Consider the giant vinyl billboard advertisement. It’s created for some fleeting movie or fast food promotion and then thrown away. But that’s not just an consumerism bummer; it’s also a business opportunity.

Colorado resident Damon Carson bought 20 old vinyl billboards for $140 when an acquaintance suggested they could be used as drop cloths for painting. With durable, waterproof vinyl to spare, he put out some feelers to see if there was a market for the stuff. And there was. “I then quickly had to start bringing them in from around the nation to keep up with demand,” he says.

Now about a year old, Denver-based Repurposed Materials is giving new life to a wide variety of industrial by-products. Used wine barrels are resold as planters. Strips of rubber from old conveyor belts are resold as truck bed lining. Old street sweeper brushes are resold as back scratchers for livestock.

The environmental benefits of Carson’s business are obvious. Every year, 7.6 billion tons of nonhazardous industrial trash ends up in landfills. Each billboard or wine barrel Carson repurposes is another that doesn’t get tossed.

It also makes economic sense for everyone involved, however. For his customers, many of whom are farmers, buying something repurposed is often much less expensive. Carson sells used street sweeper brushes, for example, for about $100; a new livestock brush could cost as much as $1,500. And the companies that give their old equipment to Repurposed Materials save money on landfill fees.

Repurposing isn’t new, of course, but Carson is doing it on a larger scale than your average Etsy craftsman. He estimates the company has kept 100 tons of potential waste out of landfills so far. And in its first year, Repurposed Materials has generated around $150,000 in revenue. He already has an agreement with the city of Denver and he’s “within a few weeks of working with cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia on some of their waste streams.” Carson says MillerCoors and Whole Foods may also soon sign up.

Is the success due to burgeoning ecological awareness or the simple cost savings? “Our buyers, fortunately, think it makes sense for both reasons.”

When one of his billboard customers asked about rubber products, and Carson started repurposing old conveyor belt material, he had his second product line and a new company, Repurposed Materials.

Original Article by Andrew Price, found at Fast CoExist, part of the Fast Company Magazine. Andrew Price is a writer in Los Angeles.

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Billboard images are typically printed on PVC plastic or polyethylene. Polyethylene is the more environmentally sensitive choice, since the material (the same as in soda bottles) can be recycled into products like fiberfill for winter coats and plastic bottles. PVC, on the other hand, is rarely accepted for recycling.

A company in Denver, Repurposed Materials, has found a use for PVC billboards that are no longer in use. They collect the vinyl and repurpose the sheet to be used as a tarp.

The material is 20 mils thick, or about 4 times the thickness of most commercially-available tarps, so they are very strong. Since they are intended to be billboards, they are extremely UV resistant, and will withstand extreme heat and cold. They also are cheap, costing about 75% less than similar tarps.

Repurposed Materials has tarps in many different sizes, ranging from 10×30 to 14×48. They can also be bonded together to make larger tarps. They are typically used with the back side of the vinyl showing, so the ad is hidden and the tarp looks black or white. They can be shipped anywhere in the country, or picked up in Denver.

The company has other used materials available for reuse, including railroad ties, snow fences, very large tires and conveyor belts.

Original Article found on the WholeBuffalo.com web site

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