Giving trash a new life on the farm

With everything from old concrete blocks to billboard vinyls, and hockey glass to military cargo parachutes, repurposedMaterials has what you could call an eclectic inventory of items just waiting for their second life.

"The main thing we bring to the marketplace is this act of repurposing: Giving waste products, obsolete to primary industry, a second life in a very different way," Carson says.

Carson has what he describes as a "used mentality," informing many of the decisions in his life from his outfit — entirely thrifted at a Goodwill — to his business. Not everyone has this mentality, Carson says, but those who do are always looking for ways to recycle and reuse. They're repurposedMaterials' primary clientele.

"In America, the land of abundance, we can all go solve our problem in the next 10 minutes on Amazon buying brand-new," Carson says. "Part of the mentality is frugality, but it's also the thrill of the hunt. It's the 'Hey, I could have solved my problem for a dollar, but I was patient, I kept hunting and I solved my problem for 50¢.' "

The used mentality is something Carson can't turn off, meaning he is always on the lookout for goods that could be repurposed. When he's driving, he's always "ogling" the flatbed semi-trucks on the interstate. Whether it's steel, plastic, or rubber in tow, Carson is working out ways to reuse or recycle.

Billboard to Business

The idea for repurposedMaterials was years in the making. Carson was first introduced to the waste business up in the ski resorts around Vail and Breckenridge, Colorado, where he and a partner operated a traditional garbage company. When Carson would deliver waste to a landfill, he noticed a lot of items mixed in with the garbage that might not necessarily belong there and had potential for another life.

The "lightbulb moment" came to Carson when an airbrushing painter he worked with suggested using old roadside billboard advertising vinyl as drop cloths for painting. This is where his "used mentality" and his days spent on the garbage truck collided and formed repurposedMaterials.

"The McDonald's ad campaign for 99¢ Big Macs is over," Carson said. "So that substrate that big ad is printed on, is obsolete. It's going in the trash. They can't reprint it. You give that to a farmer and he covers a haystack with it in a second life, or uses it as a pond liner."

Recently, repurposedMaterials made a deal with Armstrong Flooring to purchase 300,000 pounds (seven semi loads) of felt material that they used for backing material when making linoleum floors. Companies like Armstrong have landfill diversion goals. Carson said they're unlikely to sell that back to a linoleum manufacturer, so "the great hunt begins" for what other industries could repurpose it.

A Day in the Second Life

In many cases, the great hunt leads Carson to corporate America where he spends a lot of time marketing and pitching his company's brand of resourcefulness. Unlike many of these clients, however, he doesn't have much to teach farmers. Carson grew up in a small town in central Kansas, and while he didn't live on a farm, whether it was friends or family, farming was always around him.

"The ag industry is the one industry that has maintained its resourcefulness," Carson says. "I introduce repurposing to a lot of industries and it just blows their mind like I created something new. In the ag industry, it continues, and it's never died down."

Farmers and ranchers make up a large portion of Carson's regular customers, and he has seen his inventory used for a variety of inventive uses over the years.

Used rubber conveyor belting is a "wear part" in the mining industry. It might start out 36 inches wide and ⅝ inches thick. As it conveys rock, coal, sand, it gets thinner and thinner. When it gets to be ⅜-inch thick, it's too thin so they replace it. Carson says the conveyor belt is so generic, versatile, and adaptable, it's the "Swiss Army knife" of materials. Cattle ranchers will often use that conveyor belt as windbreaker for their cattle to protect from north winds.

Elevator cable is an aggressively replaced material to meet safety standards. It also happens to make good fencing material for corrals, or a cable to drag a tractor out of a mudhole.

"They don't wait until 'Man, that cable is starting to fray, I hope we can get two more days out of it before it just breaks,' " Carson jokes.

No Bull#$&%!

Brandon Stewart raises bucking bulls for rodeos on his ranch in Stephenville, Texas. Stewart needed to level out an arena set on the side of a hill. He brought 18 truck loads of dirt to his property but found pouring concrete or purchasing sheet metal would be too expensive for the 4-foot retaining wall he needed built.

That's where repurposedMaterials came in.

Instead of spending an arm and a leg for concrete, Stewart found highway guardrails — each about 11 to 12 inches tall. Stacking four of those on top of each other, he had the perfect retaining wall he needed.

Buzz off!

Steven Scheer, a former farmer from Lowden, Iowa, has patented a flytrap built out of items from repurposedMaterials. Before building the flytraps, Scheer would pour poison over his cattle to protect them from flies and the pink eye virus they would carry around his livestock.

"I just did not like that," Scheer said. "We had natural cattle which just grazed on grass, with a little bit of grain in the winter time to keep their weight."

Scheer needed something to cut down on the fly population, while maintaining the natural style of farming he preferred. He and his son built their first iteration of the flytrap a dozen years ago or so, but it wasn't quite working how they wanted. Since then, they have more or less perfected their invention.

The containers are mostly made from recycled materials, save for the bait and some rivets. Scheer had found through some trial and error that flies are more attracted to darker color barrels. All of the traps have four openings, equally separated and about 28 inches off the ground on the larger model. Flies will go in and feed off water in the barrel with fly attractants. The trapped flies are able to see out of a clear plastic window at the top where they will buzz around for a few days until they die.

"It incorporates things flies can't turn down," Scheer says. "We give them an offer they can't refuse. They get in and they can't get out."

Out to dry

Joe Trenkle is a former hemp farmer out of Colorado. Hemp farming is still a relatively new (legally anyway) farming industry, which means it can be difficult to come by specific equipment and materials for harvest. Trenkle took used netting from repurposedMaterials inventory, and hung it from the ceiling down to the floor. He would then stick the branches of the hemp plant inside the netting to let it air dry.

Trenkle also bought some billboard vinyl from repurposedMaterials, which he used as tarps to cover his windrows. Air was still able to move beneath them, but it shielded his harvest from the rain while he let it dry out.

"Instead of me having to engineer it, fabricate it, manufacture it, get it shipped over from wherever it is, and implement it into my warehouse — I would have missed my harvest season from that," Trenkle said. "That's why it was nice to be able to find something that was a repurposed material."

You scratch mine, I'll scratch yours

Street sweepers are another wear part Carson keeps in his inventory. The plastic bristles on the brushes start out about 36 inches in diameter. After a lot of use sweeping debris on the streets, brushes will get down to about 22 to 24 inches in diameter and are no longer able to touch the street.

Rather than letting them turn to waste in a landfill, Carson said he has built a strong customer base selling them as backscratchers for animals. Some of these customers include livestock farmers, zoos, and Ted Turner, founder of CNN. Turner, the second-largest individual landowner in the United States, has 45,000 bison across his 14 ranches, the largest private herd in the world. That's a lot of backs to scratch.

Learn more

RepurposedMaterials has inventory yards in Maquoketa, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; Dallas Fort-Worth, Texas; and Williston, South Carolina. While not all of their inventory is available for shipping, many products can be shipped throughout the continental United States. For more information about repurposedMaterials, visit their website at repurposedmaterialsinc.com.