welcome to recycled Idaho for to recycling industry veterans bread a cart mixed matters for Idaho businesses and organizations that are putting in the work to keep Idaho environmentally and economically viable at the same time take a listen to how these entrepreneurs business owners and operators making things happen in the great state of Idaho on this boots on the ground I get a chance to see a whole other side of recycling as I walked with Dell hope owner of diamond street recycling here with Dell hope the owner of diamond street recycling how you doing Dell doing good thanks we’re gonna do a quick tour and kind of see how it works here sure thanks Dale yeah you bet so this is obviously our front gate we receive all of our materials yeah we have this little sign-in shack where people pay as you go so they pay I notice here you’re measuring off a cubic yard yes we don’t charge we’re pretty fair as far as what’s coming in and so unique be his business in that way that people pay to bring the material in and then we value add to it

and sell it back yeah yeah but you obviously have that cost yeah this way you have to still charge right it’s a little different than what our commodities is a different commodity so this area we’re here in here now is our retail area with all of our our bins and these are the products we make we do import a few products the we call it the black and tan barge yeah I’m from you yeah but we most the products you see here we we make we do our own coloring our own screening and we make our own compost I’ll show you that as we get further into the walk all this this bark is mulch you’re making that here yeah so most of it comes from the tree companies around the valley they bring us in there their chip material and there are rounds and then we resize it screen it color it will deliver small volumes all the way up to how to charge using our ocular trailers okay so we keep this is our lumber and clean pallet pile and this is what we make our cattle bedding out of we don’t

color any of the product off of this so we will chip that and screen it and make it into mostly for dairy got you Gary dairy farms for the cattle yeah okay yeah it’s a special cut the dairy industry something a little more fine and a little more what are you’re using it for they use it as bedding for their dairy cattle off to the left you can see that’s our coloring plant that’s like we can walk around this way if you want through the through the trommel in this is Marisa mulch new to you guys though right we started coloring on a smaller scale a smaller oh about ten years ago god she’s even doing the coloring for a while yeah but this machine I remember kind of when he moved it in yeah we got this one probably about four years ago okay just to increase our productivity and you know each year we sell more and more colored mulches and it’s it’s been a pretty good business a lot of people are catching on to it well I’ve just noticed this from being your neighbor my god you guys have so

much traffic constantly yeah yeah even just walking over here I just always surprised on how many and then like you said so many reoccurring like I’ve got any business owners that kind of hoping for reoccurring business yeah maintain those relationships right we’ve we’ve got most the major players that do all the landscaping maintenance the big companies come in and see us we also have city and county government customers we have most of the large tree trimming services that come in but we’ve been really blessed to have those customers who are loyal to us and they’ve obviously bring in some pretty good product so these are our drying bins and with these are the three separate colors that we make the brown the red and the black okay and we just made some fresh stuff today but we make these big areas here and what we’ll do is we’ll pull those piles down and let them dry because mulch has about a thousand different types of molds okay grow in it so the quicker we can get it to dry the better do you have like a test like a moisture test to know it

it’s all basically just by fill feel and look and eyeball and yeah once we get it dry it’s pretty obvious and got you how long with this pile sit here roughly before it moves well sorry pal we’ve been selling a lot two weeks ago because of the good weather the mulch just really started flying out of here so we’ve I don’t know exact numbers we’ve sold probably a couple thousand yards of colored material already just in the last three weeks oh wow and then this is the raw material that comes in we stockpile it from the tree companies will pull out the wood book the big rounds and any kind of salvageable wood to get yeah and we sell it as firewood so we’ll let it season for a year and then we sell it in semi loads to people who will deliver it so he’s out rather than send it through the chipper in color we just sell it as far away you’ll send it in semi loads like you said and will that get split by them usually yeah we just we tell them that you get what you get then you

know you get we’ll try to give you as many rounds as possible but sometimes you get longer lines but we only sell 85 bucks here that’s how the chord so it’s a pretty good deal plus we delivery this is a really nice surface type product of people use for like I get dirty hard we put our top layer you can see what it looks like out here cast a dust down it’s better than gravel it doesn’t travel as much it’s got a lot of oil in it so people make RV pads out of it okay yeah yeah I didn’t know you guys made this actually yeah we were doing it up until about five years ago yeah and the market was allowed us to charge about nine dollars a yard but that has changed over the last five years it’s now $20 a yard oh wow makes more sense to fire up that crusher yeah because that’s obviously expensive to run that yeah so how many acres are we on 32 out of the 32 acres 28 acres of it was a 40 feet yeah hole that had been mined out all the pit

around us and had taken out of it so we were just using it for dump site for concrete and a dirt hole and then we just kind of got into all these other aspects of the business and it turned out pretty good well you have to run that stuff yeah that’s what we call our overs okay and we’ll rerun it we keep in a separate pile and when we’re ready we’ll make adjustments on the Grizzly so we can get it to stay in the impact zone longer and make it into three corner machine that’s it’s a beast talking to people and putting out there’s like people don’t realize like to recycle a lot of these products you’ve got to have a machine like that you know you’ve got it you got to do things like that to invest and it’s not cheap it’s not cheap at all and it’s not easy either both like a lot of people don’t realize what true recycling is like and you’re looking at it this is it where do a lot of people get rid of that concrete now do you know well though landfills no they go

up to the the pits up on self Pleasant Valley okay I’m not sure if amadon spit Rocky Mountain is taking it yep he got he just relocated you probably get that question a lot yeah so we’ve said it must end them up there there’s two or three pits up there taking it so what we’re looking at straight ahead is our brush pile this is kind of a catch-22 for us because we get more volume in and we can recycle and we screen it and make topsoil out of it okay yeah sure yeah it’s too much I mean we as we’re growing and getting more experienced in the recycle side we’re developing more products that will utilize these branches yeah we make a coarse material out of it but we don’t color any of that but you’re going up here to the right here you’ll see all of our wind roses for our compost facility and this is probably one of our more profitable types so what we do is we allow customers or bring in their grass and leaves turn them and water on them and keeping the guard and then once they’re

fully cooked come up a chair in there yeah when did how long have you been doing the compost ever since you guys so what what Brett did for us in the early years is figured out he did some research figure out what it would take a compost so by trial and error we came up with this method of wind blowing and watering and turning of letting it set and almost out of it and then we invested in a screening plant trying to figure out the size when we first started we had just a really small little turner yeah this is a Turner I bought last year we haven’t used it yet but you can ride along on that and machinery yeah that turns the compost it’s important that you turn it and aerate it and keep it wet while it’s still cooking okay and then once it’s all done then it cools off is sent to a screening plant but yeah I was it was a trial and error in the first few years to see what mix made sense and how long it took and if we could even sell it and now

every cubic yard that we make we sell we never had yeah you don’t have enough when we have customers that want to want us to commit to climb under a thousand yards wow it’s hard to do that because then especially like my Saturday customers are one-off homeowners and they come in and if I didn’t have any for them for their garden that’d be a yeah we hate to sell it all out in huge volumes if I had the capability or be able to make more of it than I could commit tomorrow yeah part of the growing pains oh yeah he gotta like pick your poison I wanted to do her off and your time and efforts word word we’re gonna dedicate more and more and we have over the last few years more and more of the land so we’re about we’re probably going to have somewhere about five acres dedicated just to composting out of the 32 okay so it takes a lot of area okay yeah and so all the grass that gets delivered this coming spring and summer would that be the in the compost the following year most of

it most of it throughout the throughout the summer season we were constantly mixing it as we can when we get one row down I’m moving forward then we make another row so we try to get as fresh as grass so we can cuz that’s where it’s hot and moist and and then we take the leaves what we call the Browns last year which we have stockpiles on the other side there and we’ll mix them keep them going as fast as we can one guy can run that thing and just turn it on and we can make hundreds an hour oh yeah how far do you guys deliver like how Freddie go out oh we’ve delivered as far as Twin Falls we’ve taken stuff out to Emmett we go up north toward Cascade McCall yeah after a while it doesn’t make sense because the delivery costs are more than the product yeah but you got to kind of pick a area yeah kind of like we’ve got a few customers around Falls area that we deliver to so this is our other screen and here separates so once the compost is ready send it through

a screening plan most of our customers so okay something side effect from us the high quality compost like a black gold it’s really okay I find Home Depot yeah I look like this no it doesn’t know it’s got a lot of chunks in it yeah like that’s why didn’t recognize it to be honest with ya writing a compost I don’t really think it almost looks like top sauce yeah that’s what I thought from back there you know that it was cuz and we do tests on it to check pH level and different things that are in it and a lot of our gardening friends and customers prefer it over other types including the bagged have you ever thought about I have but it kind of it was its own problem because the moisture in the bags kind of promote growth of mold and so I kind of haven’t really rolled on it because I really don’t want to root the product hey you gotta pick your poison if your customers are happy and you can’t even keep enough of it in stock yeah I mean really like well we make you know we offer

a really good price point for bulk you know at one yard at a time or 100 yards or whatever people want it’s better than buying in a bag buying in a baggie even in a pan two or three times the money oh yeah I know there’s convenience and bagging but and having bags but we just haven’t really tackled a problem keep being able to deliver a high quality mostly dry product yeah you’ll see the bags at the convenience stores or the hardware stores and they’re out front and they’ve got all that moisture in it yeah you can’t hardly even see through the plastic and that’s one of the real challenges there’s a lot of like sticks and stuff in it yo look there is like it’s it can be kind of nasty yep yes we’re we’re walking now used to be 40 feet deep hole this has all been filled in with yeah with dirt and concrete eventually we’re going to take some of this oh my yeah it’s no more hole that’s for sure is well our location really lent itself well to that backfill of this they call it a reclamation from

the pit yeah well hopefully that’s kind of change they’re supposed to fix that yep Orchard you went to that meeting you were telling me about that yeah so they are gonna put a light right there yes I think there’s gonna be a light and whiter more lanes okay so now we’re kind of on the back farthest away from the screening plant so you can see these these rows don’t look near as black and no near as ready so these are the pressure of folks that are cooking gotcha so this is the freshest and then down the line is age now I’m at in there probably 12 to 14 weeks old okay it’s probably maybe a week old just a lot of people we’ve been more involved in trade shows yeah and different community functions where people are starting to be more and more aware of us so this is kind of our I posit skull was left about grass okay we’re waiting for fresh grass so hopefully in the other month or so we’ll get more fresh grass and that’s where we call our Browns or it’s our leaves okay amazingly people are still

bringing the leaves in call right now we didn’t really have much of a winter you know so you definitely figured out how to fill up 32 acres yeah that’s for sure yeah everything we’ve walked on so far he used to be 40 feet deep yeah greatly with 1,300 more bark that’s got the b12 count motor in it okay this has got a high output and this is what we’ve seen most of our column aterial and we’ll also chip that brush pile without larger machine this is so much quicker so this stuff goes over here yeah this is our finished product this way cars are very vending or countable yep okay we have our local client that’s considering buying it in large volumes and bag for their retail operation okay we’re we’re kind of hopeful that that might get off the ground it’d be cool yeah I said it over and over and that was like the coolest thing I’m a job I passed my kids and whoever wants this like it is very wicked on it like and I get it see like you know this is all here in Boise you know

I know all this stuff like people don’t realize yeah and it’s amazing to me like the kids are there showing how it’s made but you know as I guess kind of what I do like I gotta go say hey how do you guys do this Matt Matt yeah so be it I get another recycling place like here a manufacturer no there’s just so much more to it all yeah what you see today is a result of basically customer demand because a people basically said hey we want this we need this if you can make this like now we have more customers coming for the soil blends we have more dairies coming to us to say well can you change the cut for this or that you know we have more and more commercial customers who want to buy in bulk and then they can either color or baguette well it sounds like you’re willing to listen to your customer like that goes a long way with a lot of people we when we first started this I told everybody that I want to make sure that the customer is happier and we are so

when the customer leaves us yeah I want to make sure they’re happy that’s that best advertising is still word of mouth yeah he’s always been happy when I come over you know what I mean it’s a it has its challenges and you know repair on this equipment is very high it has a lot more levels than I ever imagined oh yeah when it comes just the basic repairs that’s crazy but the business supports it and it’s gone well and he provided just a valuable service like like I said earlier I see how busy you are you know I mean obviously you’re supplying good product and a good service to me the service part is the secret is you listen to your customers your even open Saturdays the season was Saturday and will stay open until the Saturday just before Thanksgiving so we could probably open on Sundays but these guys work awful hard this kind of day yeah yeah we could too you know but I think it’s important to recharge your batteries you know give everybody that one day yeah all right anything else you want to show us I think that’s part

that over there is just our mixed load piles of people bringing stuff they don’t want to separate gotcha so then yeah it’s kind of a you charge more for those loads we do and they don’t want to separate it yeah because we have to put more manpower and excavator out there you got to sort it sort and stuff that we can’t recycle a school anthem do you have to keep an eye on a lot of people are people for the most part pretty pretty honest well I would like to believe that customers especially our repeat customers yeah pretty in tune to where to go and what we expect and how we do have the occasional personal kick out there McDonald sack and yeah into the branch pile or the always gonna get that one off when we catch people back here once while smoking and we have no smoking signs all over the place oh you have this reason obviously yeah but most people if you ask them then not smoke they’re pretty fast and for them for sure but we do have guys little monitor loads and redirect I figure do you have

you some staff I’m making sure they got a kayak rent that when the gal that sign in booth takes the money she she’ll look at loves direct people then I have other people out here at each pile will kind of keep an eye on our customers and help them that’s the case um yeah it’s not real obviously if you haven’t been here before what stuff yeah I’ll take it one of those friendly customers there you go love it thank you for listening to another episode of recycled Idaho and as we continue the journey across this great state we look forward to bringing you more stories of people and organizations putting in the work to do the right thing