### Podcast Transcript

**Damon Carson:**
An engineer raises his hand and he asks me point blank in front of the whole crowd, “Damon, did you invent repurposing?” And I thought it was the most ignorant, ill-informed question I’ve ever heard.

*Welcome to A Scrap Life.*

**Brett:**
All right, I’m back. A Scrap Life. I enjoy doing podcasts with people that I’ve spent very little time around, or had very few interactions with, because you get to tell the true story — ask them where they came from, how they got started, and whatever else — and it’s a genuine ask because you haven’t really gone down that path before. So, I got hit up by a guy named Damon Carson who owns Repurposed Materials, and I thought he had a very intriguing story, a super interesting story. So I wanted to get him on the podcast, let him tell you his story, let him talk about his company, and just let everybody know what he’s doing, because I think there’s a lot of crossover with what we do on the scrap side.

And if you don’t know Damon, it’s a really good opportunity to listen to what he’s got cooking, and maybe there’s a win-win out there, which is what I’m always looking for. So, welcome Damon, and thanks for taking the time out of your day. How’s things going today, man?

**Damon Carson:**
Brett, thanks for the opportunity. It’s going well. It’s actually cool here in the Denver area today. We’ve got the fires burning in the mountains, but on the Front Range, it’s nice weather.

**Brett:**
On a side note, I’m leaving tomorrow to fly to Denver. So, I’m actually coming in.

**Damon Carson:**
We should have lunch tomorrow. Maybe we should have lunch.

**Brett:**
Yeah. A friend of mine set it up and we were supposed to go hike Mount Massive, but I guess there’s a fire up there that’s going to stop that. So we’re going to go do Mount Harvard instead. Is that anything you know about?

**Damon Carson:**
I have not summited that one, but I do know where you’re talking about. Yeah.

**Brett:**
Nice. So when I think about Denver right now, that’s what I’m thinking about. But obviously you’re based out of Denver and you own Repurposed Materials. So give me a little background — what is Repurposed Materials and what have you got cooking? Because you’ve got warehouses all over the country doing this, and this is good for everybody out there to listen to. You might have something in your backyard that could help you out. So fire away. Tell me about what you’ve got.

**Damon Carson:**
Oh, I always start with the triangle: reduce, reuse, recycle. What we are not — we are not recycling. Chip, shred, grind, melt: that’s not what we do. We’re on the reuse side. We look for the byproducts and waste, cast-offs, and discards of American industry that have value as is — that don’t need to be ground up, don’t need to go to waste-to-energy, that still have utility value as is.

A couple of other word pictures, Brett. We call ourselves an industrial thrift store. An industrial thrift store. If you’re familiar with the Habitat for Humanity ReStores that are all over the country, that’s kind of what we are, but on steroids — bigger industrial and commercial stuff. Habitat ReStores are typically building materials at a small residential scale. It’s a similar business model; we’re just a lot bigger: heavy steel, lumber, big rubber products, etc., that I’m sure we’ll dialogue more about in this podcast. The last little phrase I would use is “used, surplus, salvage.” That also paints a good mental word picture of who we are and what we do.

**Brett:**
So, out of curiosity — because everybody’s got an origin story, and we’ll get into your day-to-day business — was there an aha moment? Was there something that made you decide this is something I want to get into? Did you see some material? Did you see an opportunity? How does this start? What’s your background, Damon?

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah. How in the world? Well, I don’t know how old you are, Brett, but in the late ’70s, early ’80s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups had a commercial where the chocolate meets the peanut butter. And I like to say part of my life was the chocolate and part of my life was the peanut butter.

The chocolate was the late ’90s, early 2000s: a partner and I owned a garbage company in the ski resorts, Vail and Breckenridge, here in Colorado. We would take roll-off dumpsters full of trash off construction sites, take them to the landfill, tip them back, and the garbage would slide out. But what you quickly realize is that 2, 4, 8% of the stuff isn’t garbage. It’s three perfectly straight 2x4s, or two windows still in the wrapper from the factory. Why in the world are these in the trash? But on the job, who knows — off spec, wrong measurements. So I became very familiar with the waste stream of America. We’ll call that the chocolate.

The peanut butter is my personality. I like to buy used things. Everything I’m wearing today — my New Balance shoes, my Spyder jacket — all came from Goodwill thrift stores. That’s just who I am. And it’s my own statistic, Brett, you can fact-check me, but I think 12 to 18% of Americans have a used mentality. If most people want to buy a bicycle to ride around their local lake, they go to a bike shop or Amazon and buy new. But those of us with a used mentality will go to a flea market, a garage sale, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, and look for a used bike. So that’s my peanut butter.

Where they met: we sold our garbage business to Waste Management and I bought another, unrelated business. As part of that business, I had an airbrush painter in one day who also paints in the advertising industry, and as he was walking out he said, “Damon, if you ever get a chance to buy an old advertising billboard vinyl — like you see on the sides of the highways advertising Budweiser, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola — when they take those down, those old billboard vinyls make a great drop cloth for painting.” And that was my eureka, my aha, my firework moment, my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moment. I was like, “Oh my gosh, it’s waste to the advertising industry — unwanted, obsolete — but it’s waterproof vinyl: pond liners, hay tarps, covering firewood, covering building materials.” So that was my Reese’s moment.

**Brett:**
I think you’re very good with descriptive words, and I think you just put it well. You took something you’re very passionate about, which is buying used things — and you’re obviously an entrepreneur — and you come from the waste, recycling, trash industry, whatever word you want to use, and you married those two together and built what we’re about to discuss with Repurposed Materials. That’s the aha, that’s the Reese’s.

Was there something when you were young, on the youth side of it? Did you grow up poor, or was it just something interesting to you, or was that how you had access to stuff? Because nobody just gets into the trash business without some sort of inkling — either there’s an opportunity there, or I like equipment, or whatever the case may be. There had to be something in your DNA that pushed you in that direction.

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah. I was born to a mother who was frugal, so that’s probably a lot of it. My dad was a spender; my mom was frugal. But I think — I was born and raised in central Kansas, rural America, a very small town. John Cougar’s 1980s hit “Small Town” is kind of the anthem of my youth; lyric for lyric, it describes my upbringing. I wasn’t raised on a farm — my father was a small business owner — but I had lots of friends and relatives in farming and ranching, so I grew up around it.

Agriculture is the one industry where they just take old oil field pipe and make horse corrals or cattle fences out of it, or highway guardrail. When Union Pacific or Burlington Northern takes up railroad ties, they’ll take those ties from horizontal to vertical and make them into fence posts. So I think it was that exposure over the 18 years of my growing up. I saw this pattern, and that Reese’s moment was magnified because I witnessed it day in and day out growing up.

**Brett:**
Well, I grew up in Idaho, and that’s the mentality of a farmer, right? Especially the more rural you are, you don’t just go buy a new fender or a new tire or a piece of steel. You fix the tractor, you fix the wheel, you fix the hub, you fix the hay rake — you fix it on site. Sometimes it’s with something you have on hand, or you’re looking for a piece, or you make a piece. It’s not like you could just get on Amazon — at least you didn’t used to — order the part and have it on your doorstep in rural Kansas, right?

So I think farmers, if you go back in history, had to be some of the ultimate reuse people. That’s why when you do farm cleanups of the scrap, you’re like, why do they have 10 of the same tractor just parked out here? Well, because that’s how you used to have to do it, right? They couldn’t have parts delivered. They had to make it or reuse it. So it makes a ton of sense to me when you say you come from a farming background, because I feel like those are the ultimate reuse, repurpose guys right out of the gate.

**Damon Carson:**
Oh, absolutely. It’s interesting. If there’s an industry you can think of, we sell these used and surplus materials to them, but a farmer, a rancher, anybody in ag — you don’t have to tell them stories. They just get it. They’re just looking for solutions.

Now contrast that, Brett. I speak around the country on the topic, and I was speaking to a group of engineers, probably a decade ago. We get to the Q&A at the end, and a mid-50s engineer raises his hand and asks me point blank in front of the whole crowd, “Damon, did you invent repurposing?” And I thought it was the most ignorant, ill-informed question I’ve ever heard. Of course, I kept a straight face and answered it. But if you have parents or grandparents that lived through the Great Depression, you know that’s the mentality. My wife and I like to travel — we were just in the Philippines a few months ago, and we’ve been to Africa several times. You go to any third-world country and this reuse, repurposing mentality is everywhere. But in America, the Western world, the first world, in lands of abundance, we just go buy new. We go buy new. We go buy new. So it’s kind of been bred out of us.

But in rural America — Idaho, Kansas — farmers and ranchers, grandpa’s still on the farm, dad’s still on the farm, because they’re succession farming. Kind of like the scrap metal business: a lot of it is multi-generational, and grandpa taught me how to be resourceful. But again, if you were born in the big city, you know: go buy new, go buy new, go buy new.

**Brett:**
Well, I think as scrapyard owners we’re so used to the concept, because we’re always coming across things. All my guys will ask, “Do you want me to set that aside?” If a 40-foot I-beam comes in, I’m like, set that aside. If they see something that looks decent, they’ll text me photos and I’ll say set that aside. So I’m not the only one, right? That’s a lot of the mentality. And then at a certain point you’ve held it long enough, and either you can’t sell it or you haven’t found a use for it.

My dad and I used to joke about it — we had kind of a fence line of things we’d set aside, and people would stop by all the time: “Hey, would you sell that?” “Yeah.” “How much?” And we’d say 100 bucks or whatever, just put a number on it. Then after a year or two we’d get tired, we’d need the space, and we’d go through and take that out, take that out, take that out. And I kid you not, the next day somebody would be like, “Hey, that piece of I-beam or that plank that was over there — we’ll buy that from you.” They’d asked us for a price on it a year ago. They’d drive by it and see it. But it’s the day you cut it up that they say, “Okay, I’ll buy it.” Now that it’s not available, right?

But I feel like in our industry we’re the ultimate reuse people. We’re always scabbing stuff together, rebuilding something. Some of it has been bred out of us — there’s a lot of things I buy new, for sure — but there’s a lot of stuff we just build here in house. That’s why I’m always saving stuff. And I’m not an anomaly. I bet almost every multi-generation scrapyard owner can walk you around their yard and say, “We built that, we built that, we bought that as scrap, we rebuilt that.” But it’s super interesting to talk to somebody who’s taken that to the whole next level. You didn’t just say, “Hey, I’ve got a yard full of seconds” — you have a whole business on everybody’s seconds, right?

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah, it’s a mix — scratch and dent. But yeah, we’re the middleman. It’s kind of a dirty word in America, but whether it’s Subaru or ExxonMobil or a midsize construction company, they don’t know what to do with this stuff. They’re looking for options.

**Brett:**
Yeah.

**Damon Carson:**
So they call somebody, we get referrals, or they Google, “How do I get rid of this stuff and keep it out of the landfill?” Or, “Geez, this is too good to recycle. What can I do?” And so we get these calls. A few years ago there was another TV commercial — Dos Equis had the most interesting man in the world. I laughed at the time and said, “Well, I don’t think I’m the most interesting man in the world, but I would argue I may have the most interesting inbox in the world.”

A good case in point: a glass company called us. They had level eight, two-inch-thick ballistic glass — bullet-resistant glass — huge panels, three and a half feet wide, 10 feet tall, 800 pounds each. The first truckload was going to Sacramento to be installed at the state capitol complex in California. I’m not exactly sure whether they made it wrong or the state of California changed their specs, but they weren’t going to install that first truckload of glass. And he told me, “This is about $200,000 worth of glass.” I didn’t know this, but level eight ballistic glass is the highest-rated bullet-resistant glass there is. The glass at your bank tellers is level three or level four, so this is twice as thick. He said, “Damon, we’re just going to throw this brand-new glass, still in the crates, in the trash. Can you help us?”

So we took a position on it. It came to one of our warehouses, and you start putting it out there, looking for that resourceful, bargain-hunting person or organization. And son of a gun, we found out the Abilene, Texas zoo was building a brand-new lion exhibit. Instead of iron bars and chain-link fence like the old-time zoos, the new zoos — whether it’s the gorillas or the tigers — put in really thick glass so it’s a better viewing experience. So the Abilene zoo purchased that whole semi-truckload of glass to install in their new lion exhibit. It was going to go in the trash because it didn’t meet California’s specs; it sat at our place; and then resourceful zoo people said, “Man, we could save a whole lot of money buying that glass versus buying new.” That’s a good story of the before and the after.

**Brett:**
I love it. I’m sure you could go on and on, and I’m going to drag a few more out of you. So I’m curious: you grow up in the middle of rural Kansas, and you end up in Denver in the trash business. What’s the lead? How does that work?

**Damon Carson:**
Well, just to clarify, I was in the ski resorts, Vail and Breckenridge, which are 100 miles west of Denver, but still Colorado.

**Brett:**
Okay.

**Damon Carson:**
I was out of college being a ski bum, but I thought I wanted to be a business owner. Do you own a bike shop, a ski shop? You’re in a ski area, and I knew the economy in the late ’90s was booming, but what do you do as a twenty-something? And I remember — not to be graphic — I was working on a construction project and I was in the portable toilet, and I thought, “This is a perfect business,” because by permit, every job site that pulls a building permit has to have a portable toilet.

I was an assistant superintendent with a developer, and I knew the portable toilet company also had the roll-off dumpsters — that’s fairly common, liquid waste and solid waste on construction sites — and I knew it was started by a local plumber. I told my wife, “By the end of today I’m going to know if that company’s for sale.” I called the guy. He didn’t know me, but he knew the company I worked for, and I just said, “Mike” — Mike is his name — “have you ever thought about selling your company?” One thing led to another and, I don’t know, six, eight, nine months later, we were the owners of the company.

**Brett:**
Nice. I have to believe this, because my family has a cabin up in McCall. I don’t know if you know the Boise area, but McCall is kind of like your Vail of Colorado, right? It’s not as big or as fancy, but it’s that kind of resort town. And I’ve always thought the trash coming out of those nice resort towns is a different level of trash than your typical inner-city trash, right? You’re dealing with construction sites and people who have money, and for lack of a better word, they’re just more wasteful. They’re more willing to say, “I don’t want that,” or “That’s not what I needed, I’ll buy a different one, just get rid of that.” And they don’t know what to do with it, so they just throw it in the trash. So I have to assume hauling waste out of certain zip codes is going to have a lot more repurposable material available than other places, right?

**Damon Carson:**
You’re spot on. I mentioned earlier in my Reese’s moment illustration that I like to shop at thrift stores, and I’ve done that a long time. Vail is the epicenter if you’re a thrift-store person. Fun anecdotal story: I kind of know my men’s suit brands — suits are kind of out of style now, but this was the late ’90s — and I saw this suit. It fit perfectly, and I bought it for 12 bucks. It had the label of the men’s store in Dallas where it was purchased, so I called and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about budgeting for a suit,” and told him the brand name. He went and looked, came back, and said, “Well, Damon, you’ve got really high-end taste. That’s about a $2,000 suit.” So there you buy a $2,000 suit used for 12 bucks.

But back to your point, Brett — yeah, they’re probably no more wasteful. It’s just that when they buy something, it’s a $1,200 suit, not a $300 suit.

**Brett:**
Well, and also, because they have more disposable income than the average person, generally speaking, a lot of their stuff doesn’t get worn all the way out either, right? They probably just wear it a couple of times — “Yeah, wore that, I’m good.” And to most people, that’s still in good shape.

I liken it to my son. My oldest boy is really into basketball, and he buys and sells shoes. That’s kind of his little business. He’s probably got a little entrepreneur in him like I do, and that’s always been his side hustle. He’ll buy new shoes, wear them, resell them. And now there’s all these sites. I always think back to Craigslist — that was the big national yard sale website when it first popped up — then you had eBay, and now he’s shown me all these other sites for used shoes, because that’s his jam. But pulling it back — telescope versus microscope — talking to you, I’m like, it’s not just shoes. It’s everything. And not just clothes; we’re talking real industrial applications. So when you started the trash company and you were pulling out these various items, were you reselling them at that time, or were you just imagining what it could be?

**Damon Carson:**
No, I didn’t. I certainly thought about developing a little used building material store, a thrift store, at the time, but we were busy running the trash business, so it just lodged as an idea. I’d guess, like you, Brett, you’ve got more ideas running through your head than you’ll ever act on. So that was one of those — a bookmark in my brain, I guess. And that’s probably why the Reese’s moment I already talked about was as powerful as it was, because I already had that industrial thrift store concept resonating in my brain from my trash days.

**Brett:**
Yeah. So how many years did you run the trash business?

**Damon Carson:**
Oh, it wasn’t very long — four years. In the waste business, when one of the big boys, Republic or Waste Management, wants a new territory, they don’t do it organically. They just come in and say, “Hey, we’d like to buy you out.” So it’s a roll-up.

**Brett:**
There you go. Yep, for sure. I’ve seen it in a lot of other industries. So you exit the waste business, you’ve got a little bit of money, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to do next — and you being the entrepreneur it sounds like you are, how long did it take you to start hatching the new idea?

**Damon Carson:**
I wish it had happened sooner, but life is as it is. It was, I don’t know, seven or eight years. We started Repurposed Materials with the billboards — that was the first product — in 2010. There was a few years’ lag in there.

**Brett:**
Okay. So in 2010 you start with used billboard material, right? And your first warehouse — is it in Denver, where you’re at?

**Damon Carson:**
Yep. In Denver. The second product was used conveyor belting from the mining industry. We probably brought that in about six weeks after the billboards, and we still deal in all kinds of conveyor belt. It’s a wear part in the mining industry. It might start out three-quarters of an inch, and when it gets to three-eighths they change out a 40-inch, 300-foot roll of conveyor belt, and it’s obsolete to them. Same story as the billboards: no longer good to one industry. The fancy Wall Street word is arbitrage — you take it out of one market and put it in another.

Oh my gosh, I could make a whole podcast out of industrial repurposes for used rubber conveyor belt from the mining industry. It’s just an amazing material. Sandblasters will put it up on their walls, so when they overspray, the sand blast doesn’t dig into their walls. Guys use it as track matting when they’re running skid steers or bulldozers over concrete or asphalt. Cattle ranchers, anybody in livestock, love it — it can be windbreaks, chute liners, stall mats. It’s a Swiss Army knife is what it is. It’s an amazing material.

**Brett:**
And it’s available. Oh my goodness, the fiber in it. I’m in the tire processing business, and people are like, “Why are we paying this much money to get rid of a tire?” I say, have you ever tried to cut a tire? Have you ever tried to destroy a tire, or get a tire down to crumb? Tires are made not to be destroyed. They’re made to last for a long time. That’s their original purpose, right?

**Damon Carson:**
At 70 miles an hour, we’re really glad they last.

**Brett:**
Yeah. That conveyor is no different. It’s made to move rock and mining material and metal and you name it, for a long time, right? It lives a brutal life. And just like any industry, there’s a certain point where people value downtime more than the cost of replacement, right? They’ve been running that business, that material, for a long time. They know that as soon as it goes from, you said, three-quarters down to three-eighths or a quarter or whatever it is, that’s the time — because if we break this thing in the middle, we’ve got a lot of downtime. So I’d have to assume that’s where a lot of your repurposed material comes from: people who say, “Well, it’s still got some usable life in it, but before it costs us money, let’s replace it.”

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah. A fun one — this is a ski resort one, but it’s your world, the metal world, the scrap metal world — ski lift cable. Wire rope. Lives are literally hanging in the balance at Steamboat, Stowe in Vermont, Squaw Valley in California. Are they going to wait until the wires start to fray and say, “Oh my gosh, I hope we can get one more day out of it before it snaps”? Obviously not. Could you imagine the malpractice, the lawsuits? So they retire it probably even ahead of schedule.

So what happens to it? Well, there are lots of industries where wire rope comes from, and a lot of that old wire rope just gets sent to scrap metal and chopped up into three-foot lengths. You’re in the scrap business — I’ve been told lots of scrap guys don’t like it because it’s hard on equipment. But man, there are all kinds of repurposes for it. There’s a condo project here in the ski resorts where they took old inch-and-a-half wire rope ski lift cable and made it into the handrailing. So ski lift cable that’s no longer good becomes an architectural focal point at a ski condo. That’s another example from the metals world, the steel world: why melt that ski lift cable down when it has a fun, interesting repurpose and still has value as is?

**Brett:**
So I love anything metal, right? My wife makes fun of me. She’s a schoolteacher; we live very different lives. But I’m a sucker for anything metal. And I love art — just a side note about me — anything artistic, I really enjoy. So anything architectural that looks interesting and is made out of metal, I’ll stop what I’m doing; it really catches my eye. Those are two things I really enjoy. I’m not really into painting or fine art per se, as much as I’m into metal art.

We were in Nashville and they had this really cool building where the whole side of it was basically punch-out material — steel skeletons, right? They take a steel plate and punch out all the washers or whatever they’re punching. And they had cut some design into it. That stuff could have been purposely punched to create the design, but I’ve seen it done with just random punch-outs, random skeletons, to create a facade or something cool. When I think about repurposed stuff like that from an art standpoint — like what you just said with the cable — that’s the type of thing where I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool.” Somebody had a thought and put this together. It’s not necessarily about saving the metal as much as using it for a different purpose that adds its own unique touch to something.

So that cable idea is awesome. I think it works because it’s so stiff, right? Anybody who’s ever handled cable knows — depending on the size, if you’ve got two- or three-inch cable and you weld it to some support, it ain’t going anywhere. It’s not like a sloppy rope. It’s stiff. It’d be a good handrail.

**Damon Carson:**
It probably keeps skater kids from trying to slide down it, too.

**Brett:**
Yeah, well — it’s funny.

**Damon Carson:**
I’m talking about all these, and another steel one that comes to mind is propane tanks. Once they lose their data plate, they can no longer be used as a pressure vessel to hold propane on farms. There’s all kinds of creative uses — barbecue smokers; they’ll bury them in terrain parks for snowboarding; you cut them in half lengthwise and they become feed troughs. So again, we’re talking about metals: instead of cutting that propane tank into three-foot chunks to send to the mill in a rail car, just keep it as a tank. Somebody’s going to think outside the box.

It’s funny you mentioned skeletons. Obviously a lot of scrap people are listening to this. I would love to find a source for steel skeletons — where your customer is a factory that’s just punching the same part over and over, and they have a bunch of 4×8 or 5×10 steel skeletons. Like you said, there are garden applications, architectural applications, fencing applications. Steel skeletons are your world, the metals world, the steel world. But to the factory, that’s a waste stream: “We don’t want it anymore. We punched out whatever our part was, and here’s the leftovers.”

**Brett:**
So how do you go about it? The nice thing about this podcast is most people listening are metal guys, I’m guessing, and gals. Let’s say somebody says, “Hey Damon, I’ve got access to a bunch of skeletons, and they’re in whatever town, USA.” We’ll talk about where your warehouses are, but what does that look like from you on the acquisition side? Do you say, “Okay, there’s 40,000 pounds of skeletons, those are pretty interesting, I think I can move those”? Do they send pictures to you? How does that transaction look for someone like me, or someone in our industry, dealing with you?

**Damon Carson:**
Yep. Pretty straightforward: pictures, details. And then typically it’s per ton or per pound — I usually do it per pound, that’s just the way I think about it. We’ll make an offer or we’ll negotiate, and then you weigh the truck in, weigh the truck out, times whatever the agreed-upon price is. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward transaction. And you’re not going to burn up your cutting torch, you’re not going to use labor, because you don’t have to process it — we’re in the reuse business. We don’t want it processed. We want it as is.

So yeah, it’s pretty simple. Like you said, something comes across your scale and you say, “Oh, I’ll put that in the corner.” We have multiple scrapyards across the country that will call us when that load comes across. Part of it is economics: usually we pay a little more than the mill will pay, and you don’t have the processing. I deal with scrap guys all the time, more and more. It’s funny — you guys make money by processing it, melting it down, but people are going, “Why would we melt this down? It still has utility.”

I’m sure most of your listeners rarely see oil field pipe — 2-3/8, 2-7/8 pipe — come across to be melted, because there’s demand for it from ranchers and livestock owners. Everybody knows that, so they don’t send it to scrap metal. Highway guardrail is another one. Unless it’s been in a wreck — so much guardrail gets replaced that has never even been touched. Don’t melt it down. Call somebody like us. You don’t have to process it, and it’ll make you a few pennies more per pound. But yeah, the transaction is fairly simple.

We had a fun one: a Texas guy called us. They were all painted bright yellow — panels about 5 by 10, big panels of expanded metal. Somehow they were used in the shoring for bridge building, but they were done with them. They were all metal, just angle iron and a bunch of expanded metal painted bright yellow. And he said, “Damon, surely your customer base could figure out what to do with this.” So I think we bought two truckloads of it, probably 80,000 pounds. And he was right. One of the biggest users was greenhouses. They’d put a few cinder blocks under them and put their plants on top. It’s expanded metal, so when they water, it all bleeds through. So here’s a cast-off of the bridge building industry repurposed by the greenhouse industry.

**Brett:**
So, quick question: are you a chicken-or-the-egg person? Do you see the material and think, “I can find a home for that,” or do you have a vision of where most material can go before you write the check? I’m sure, like some of us, you’re gambling to a certain extent on your network. But when you see something, are you like, “I know exactly where that needs to go,” or are you like, “I’ll take a flyer on that one because I have a pretty good idea”?

**Damon Carson:**
You used one of my favorite words: gambling. I don’t have to get on an airplane to fly to Las Vegas to gamble. I just get to look at this inbox. It’s pretty interesting. But like the yellow expanded metal panels — no, I didn’t have somebody in mind. There are three words we use: if it’s generic, versatile, and adaptable, we’ll take a risk on it. We’ll take a position on it — that’s kind of the Wall Street word as well; a position meaning we’ll buy the inventory. If it’s GVA — generic, versatile, adaptable — we don’t know if it’s going to be the cranberry farmer in Wisconsin, the copper miner in Arizona, or the golf course superintendent in Florida who raises their hand and buys one or two or six. When we took a position on that glass I talked about, I had no idea it was going to be a zoo in Texas that bought it. You just do this long enough.

**Brett:**
Yeah, I could see that. Back in Idaho, if you have that scrapyard and that stuff is sitting there, if the guys see it often enough, eventually somebody’s going to have a project where they can use that material. And now, with where the internet is compared to the early or mid ’90s, I’m sure you’ve got buyers not just all over the U.S. — with containers and everything else, I assume you ship stuff outside the United States as well, right?

**Damon Carson:**
Surprisingly, export is a very small part of our business, because what we’ve learned is I’d rather wait for the domestic buyer. There’s typically more money domestically than in export if you’re willing to wait. We do sell a little bit overseas, to the Caribbean islands, but not a lot, surprisingly. I know in the scrap business — I get your scrap magazines; that’s one of the ways I found out about you and your podcast — a lot of you ship to Turkey, ship to China, whatever. But in our business we’ve always felt we’d rather keep it domestic, because there’s more ROI keeping it domestic in most cases.

**Brett:**
So how many warehouses do you have now, Damon?

**Damon Carson:**
We have six across the country, left coast to right coast: Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina. If you draw a 300-mile radius around each of those warehouses, we’re within about a day’s truck drive of the majority — not all, but the majority — of the United States.

**Brett:**
Was that by design, or just the way it happened?

**Damon Carson:**
Absolutely by design. A call comes from San Francisco, you don’t want to ship it to Iowa, so we ship it to Arizona. A call comes from South Florida, it goes to South Carolina, etc.

**Brett:**
Nice. So how many people do you have working at your facilities?

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah, this also surprises people. It’s not that many. It’s not a lot of manpower — we have 35 employees. Each warehouse has three or four.

**Brett:**
You just need more space than people.

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah. A lot of it’s storage. Once you unload it, take pictures, and put it on the internet, you don’t touch it again until a month later, or two weeks later, or seven months later, when a guy wants it. Then you forklift it, put it on a pallet, or put it on his trailer if he’s there picking up in person.

**Brett:**
I love it. So what’s your typical warehouse space-wise? Yard space? Is it more building than yard? I’m sure each facility is a little different, but when you’re looking, is it an acre? Is it 10 acres? How big a space does a guy need to store it? Probably depends, right?

**Damon Carson:**
Yep. We have six of them and they all look different. The smallest is 15,000 square feet; the biggest is a 60,000-square-foot warehouse. The smallest yard is half an acre; the biggest yard is 5 acres for outside laydown. And it’s funny — we’ve been doing this for 16 years, and we’re looking for property in California right now to open another branch, and it’s: do we want more indoor? Do we want more outdoor? You just need storage space. That’s the bottom line.

Because again, it’s logistics. It’s just like the oil business: you pump it, and eventually you’re going to send it to the refinery, but you might want to wait until oil prices rise before you send it. That’s kind of this business, too. You don’t always find the zoo immediately for the ballistic glass. It has to sit somewhere for weeks or months — just like your scrapyard in Idaho, where it sits along the fence. If you hadn’t had that space along the fence, you would have processed it and it would have been on a rail car. But since you had the space, you could take time and look for the buyer who would pay you the extra two or three dollars to keep it as is.

**Brett:**
So what percentage of your material, Damon, are you buying versus just receiving — saving somebody a trash bill? Is it 60/40? Just out of curiosity — I don’t need to get into total value. Is it people saying, “Hey, this should have more value than me paying to get rid of it”? Obviously on the metal side there’s value in just cutting it up, so I get that. But as a whole — because you’re getting material from the construction industry, the advertising industry with the billboard wraps, you’re probably getting pitched a lot of different stuff. So it’s a two-fold question: what’s that decision like? Is it a gut feel, or are there certain items you’re always looking for? And then what determines whether you’re willing to pay for it or just receive it? Walk me through that process.

**Damon Carson:**
It’s probably roughly — I don’t know — half and half. Half we pay for, and half it’s “you haul it away,” saving them the trash bill. It’s cost avoidance for them. And with companies — here’s a crazy story. It was Facebook, Meta. They built a data center in Iowa about a year ago. They called us at the end of the job and said, “Damon, we had some design changes. We’re left with 17,000 feet of brand-new, unused, leftover fiberglass electrical conduit.” 17,000 feet — that’s three and a half miles. Two-inch, three-inch, four-inch, five-inch. And because it’s Facebook, and Zuckerberg talks about how sustainable they are, they said, “Can you help us keep this out of the landfill?” Now, fiberglass doesn’t recycle — you can’t recycle it. It’s really our truck or the trash truck. So they said, “If you’ll accept this, you can have it, and we’ll truck it to you.” Okay, great.

And more and more companies are doing this. This is crazy — I can’t even believe this happened. Anheuser-Busch, Budweiser, had a truckload of steel. Almost any right-minded procurement person, or get-rid-of-it person, knows that steel has inherent value to a recycler — 8, 10, 12 cents. They didn’t even ask any money for it. They just said, “Hey, we’ve got a bunch of steel I-beams. We canceled this project. You can have it.” But it was such a big company — and with big companies, it’s the EPA hierarchy: reuse is the highest and best use, and recycling is under that.

**Brett:**
Yes.

**Damon Carson:**
So they didn’t even care about the nine cents a pound. They just wanted a good story — to know their I-beams were going to be used by some rancher building a barn, or who knows what.

**Brett:**
Yeah.

**Damon Carson:**
Now, as far as the negotiation — that was the second question you asked — it’s always arm wrestling. At the end of the day, we’re just a trading company. The guy wants 30 cents on the dollar and we want it for free, and you just go back and forth until you arrive at a price. Right before this, I filled out a PO for a truckload of plastic pallets. I think he wanted five bucks a pallet; I offered him two, and we were at a stalemate, and finally we agreed at $3 a pallet.

**Brett:**
You’re a scrap guy. It’s in your blood. That’s what we do all day long.

**Damon Carson:**
I love to buy and sell. I love to buy and sell. I had another person with quite a big waste stream, and the asking price was $120,000. I just said, “Hey, I’m not saying that’s not a fair asking price, but I don’t have interest at that price.” That was my email right back to them. They may sell it to somebody else, or in three months they may call me back and say, “How about 30,000?” Well, how about 10?

**Brett:**
Yeah, exactly. As a used buyer, that’s what you do — you make the deal work. The reason I bring it up is that people listening to this podcast might run across something that could work for you, and I just want to set the stage: this is how it works. You send the pictures, or whatever your process is, and see if there isn’t something out there.

Because I do believe that for us on the scrap side, we’re kind of — not the last resort; I think the landfill is the last resort, right? But we kind of ride that middle line: repurpose, but also, let’s at least get it cut up and get it to a steel mill or aluminum foundry or whatever, and get it reused one way or the other, right? I think that’s the value we provide, knowing we have industrial customers who are creating products that, in the back of our minds, we know could be reused somewhere. So I get the feeling you’re not trying to cut the scrap guy out of the deal. You’re saying, “Hey, you guys have the customers. If you run across something that works for me, by all means keep your customer, do whatever — give me a call.” Am I thinking about that right?

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah, absolutely. We did a deal about 18 months ago with a scrap broker in your business. He didn’t own his own yard, but he had relationships. It was a canceled solar farm project, and he offered us 3 million pounds of steel I-beams still sitting on the ground in wrappers — material from Turkey. It had already been punched with bolt holes. We bought all three million pounds from him. So that was a guy in your industry. He was probably looking at processors and checking mill pricing, but what about reuse pricing? Apparently, I assume, we were the highest bidder, and we bought three million pounds.

**Brett:**
There you go. Well, from my standpoint, I’m super happy we did this podcast, because you’re always trying to have as many arrows in your quiver as possible, right? In our business, some of it’s “I can cut this up,” some of it’s “I can resell this,” some of it’s “it got here, it’s got to go there.” It’s the same reason I started doing social media years ago: I wanted more buyers for my scrap. I’ve told that story, but that’s why I did it. I wanted to expand my network.

And I think the value you bring — not just to our industry but to the construction industry, the advertising industry, whoever — to anybody who runs across something that has the ability to be repurposed or reused, is that it’s one more arrow in your quiver, right? I think that’s really valuable. And even though we’ve never done business, I feel like I can bring some value to the people listening by saying, “Hey, you might want to look this guy and his company up. There’s something out there, and it could be super beneficial to you.”

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah. I’ve listened to a few of your podcasts, and one of the things I consistently hear from anybody in the recycling business is that you’re on job sites and in factories all the time, especially your salespeople. And people don’t know who to call when they have stuff they don’t want. It might be a guy in the scrap metal business: “Hey, do you know anybody who’d be interested in all these plastic tubs?” Well, obviously they’re not metal, so you’re not interested in grinding them up and processing them. I get calls all the time — people just don’t know who to call. A lot of times they’ll call their scrap metal guy and say, “Hey, I’ve got a bunch of cardboard,” or “I’ve got a bunch of lumber.” So I think it could be helpful for you to have another option — an arrow in your quiver, as you said — to be able to refer people.

**Brett:**
Absolutely. Absolutely. So do you have ambitions moving forward? Obviously you said you’re looking at a facility in California.

**Damon Carson:**
Yeah — we froze. I don’t know what happened.

**Brett:**
There you go. I’ll have Sky cut that all out.

**Damon Carson:**
Do you want me to… I don’t know what you got.

**Brett:**
No, no, no. I got most of it. Or I could re-record it real quick if you want.

**Damon Carson:**
No, no, no. I think we’re in good shape.

**Brett:**
I think it’ll be fine, because the audio was good. I could hear everything you were saying. It just froze, but the audio was maintained.

But I’ll go back to it. At the end of the day, the value is that somebody out there can use material that either you may not have a home for — or let’s say it’s plastic tubs, like you just said — and it may not be in your wheelhouse as a quote-unquote scrap metal buyer or processor. There’s potentially some value out there. And what I like about it is that it allows you to take care of your customer, right? You may not have value in it, but your customer just wants it out of there: “Get this out of here. Save me a landfill bill, save me some logistics,” whatever the case may be. I want everybody to remember there are potential opportunities out there. Maybe you can take care of your customer and at the same time give Damon a call and say, “Hey, this might be something you’re interested in.” If not, it’s worth a phone call. It’s worth an email to say, “All right, this is nothing we do. We’re going to have to dispose of it.”

So before we got cut off, I’d asked a question. You’re going to put a warehouse in California, right? It sounds like that’s your next move that you’re trying to figure out. Do you have grand visions of more? Are you looking at big population centers? What’s in the future for Repurposed Materials? How big do you see this growing?

**Damon Carson:**
Well, I think the waste streams in America are quite large. Some days you wonder if you’re the right entrepreneur to see it all the way. But the hard thing is, you’ve got all these materials, and most people — the guy in Minnesota who’s got a project, the guy in Missouri who’s got a project — is he thinking used materials? If he’s not, you’re screwed. If he’s Googling for them, he’s probably going to find a company like ours. The hard part is, take that canceled solar farm: those are W6x9 beams. Well, he might have a call for W6x15. I can’t make them W6x15 beams — they’re W6x9. And if his blueprints say W6x15, man, I wish they were the other. So there are always some limitations.

**Brett:**
But they’ll make a hell of a corral, or a hell of a fence, or hell, whatever, right?

**Damon Carson:**
Exactly. We sold a bunch of them to a boat dock builder. He builds boat docks on the Niagara River, New York and Ontario. He loves them because when the ice breaks up in the spring, if those ice flows hit wood pilings, they break them. So he likes the steel. He bought, I don’t know, one, maybe two truckloads of those to build industrial-strength boat docks on the Niagara River in New York. So: a canceled solar farm project becomes a solution for a dock builder on the Niagara River.

**Brett:**
I love it. I love it. Okay, if people want to get a hold of you, Damon, what’s the best way? Give me the website, give me the phone number. How do people listening to this podcast who might have something right up your alley get a hold of you?

**Damon Carson:**
You can just Google Repurposed Materials and it’ll come up, or go to repurposedmaterialsinc.com. My direct phone is 720-615-0281. I love to talk, even if you don’t have anything for sale. I love talking to anybody in the waste economy, the used economy, and everybody in the scrap metal business. I always learn — there’s always give and take. It’s good to know how scrap guys think, and hopefully you learn how a trader of used industrial materials thinks. And you know, iron sharpens iron. It’s a Bible verse, but it’s also fitting for a scrap podcast.

**Brett:**
Yes. One thousand percent. I always say steel sharpens steel. When you hang around smart people, you usually end up smarter, right?

**Damon Carson:**
Exactly.

**Brett:**
I appreciate you taking the time. I can’t wait to put your info out there. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in America, and you just proved it out: it’s not waste until it hits the landfill floor, right? There’s a lot of opportunity out there if you want to think outside the box, or look for a company that has built a network of people who think outside the box. So thank you, Damon, for your time. This is pretty cool. I’m excited.

**Damon Carson:**
Brett, appreciate the time.

**Brett:**
Yeah, take care.