Number of words: 754

Damon Carson has one of the more interesting inboxes in America. On any given day, from his office in Denver, Colorado, he will field myriad inquiries from people looking to unload stuff. We’re not talking about the odd consumer trying to dispense with an old refrigerator, or a bagful of out-of-fashion clothing. Picture instead large companies—sometimes multinational corporations—looking to unload massive, metric-ton amounts of stuff, maybe for a price, maybe for free. Stuff that has no clear value, no immediately apparent afterlife, no clear end-user. Stuff that’s otherwise on a fast-track to the landfill. 

During a recent conversation, Carson relayed a sampling of what had come across the transom in just a few days last autumn. There was the offer to pick up surplus rolls of the fabric used to cover domed sports stadiums. There was some 20,000 kilograms of barium sulfate (formulated for lead-acid batteries) that had an iron content too high for the manufacturer’s specs. There were 28 pallet-loads of plastic bins from a discount retailer. And a major outdoor recreation company wanted to know if he was interested in nearly 800 pounds’ worth of blue rope—each 33.5 inches long—which were no longer needed to make the handles on coolers. The cost of shipping? Covered by the manufacturer. “They’re kind of a tree-hugging company,” he explained. “They don’t want to just throw it away. Nor should they. Because it has value.”

The question of what value, and to whom, is the inchoate algebra that animates Carson’s days. Call him, as he calls himself, a “waste speculator” or “materials gambler.” A yenta of the complex, never-ending waste stream of contemporary capitalism, trying not to pair people with people, but things with people. “I’m just betting that somewhere in America, I can find a home for 8,000 33.5-inch pieces of rope.”

For nearly a decade, Carson’s company, RepurposedMaterials, has been casting these wagers. He’s not looking to recycle the stuff he gets—breaking it down to make something new—but rather finding new homes for castoff goods in their original forms. He has his staples. He has miles of used firehose, for example, that no longer reliably handles water at high pressure but does work as a protective “bumper” for boat docks, among other uses. Rubber conveyor belts, past their prime on the factory floor, become “ballistic curtains” in gun ranges. The sturdy bristles from street-sweepers find their way into fields, where they serve as back-scratchers for livestock. (Customers for this include Ted Turner, who owns the most bison in the US.)

But then, every week or so, something new will come in that he knows nothing about. “I just got a bunch of ceramic paper,” he says. “I’ve never even heard of ceramic paper.” For the record, it’s a thin, fire-resistant insulator made from high-purity alumina silicate, used as heat-shielding in aircraft insulation, lining kilns, and other industrial processes. The person who will know what to do with a bunch of ceramic paper is probably the one who knew what it was for in the first place. And so Carson either needs to find that person, or to try to suss out possible uses for the material—often through his network of clients. If capitalism, in the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s famous phrase, is the act of “creative destruction,” one that isn’t particularly good at dealing with the wreckage it leaves in its wake, Carson is trafficking in creative repurposing. He wades into the vast, almost unknowable realm of the global production of things 

This is particularly fertile territory in the US. “We produce the most waste per person of any country in the world,” notes Jenna Jambeck, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of Georgia. In 2018, the most recent year for which figures are available, the US Environmental Protection Agency estimated the size of the country’s municipal solid waste stream at 292.4 million tons, roughly 4.9 pounds per person per day. The total is more than twice what it was in 1960. But Jambeck points out that’s far exceeded by industrial waste, castoffs from everything from manufacturing to agriculture. This murkier stream is far harder to track, for various reasons, but a broad spectrum of American industrial facilities create and cast off approximately 7.6 billion tons of industrial solid waste annually. 

For the moment, Carson’s unique business, which finds new lives for millions of pounds of refuse every year, is the only thing standing between that batch of ceramic paper and the landfill.

Excerpted from https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/creative-reuse-commercial-waste-master/