Through repurposing, this company keeps millions of pounds of waste out of landfills every year

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last updated 11 May 2021

RepurposedMaterials gives new life to commercial waste that is otherwise bound for the landfill.

The Denver company estimates that every year, it keeps 3 million pounds of refuse out of dumps across the United States. Its founder, Damon Carson, accepts all kinds of industrial waste — think hundreds of pounds of rope, used fire hoses, and street-sweeper bristles — and connects these castoff items to new owners.

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On average, about once a week Carson will receive an item he's never had before — recently, it was ceramic paper — and he gets to work learning about the product and then finding the right new owner. Carson got the idea to start RepurposedMaterials while working in the trash business, and saw up close how wasteful people can be, throwing away perfectly good items like windows still wrapped in factory plastic. Since then, he has found that even if it doesn't seem like it, every discarded item that comes his way has value. Read more at Popular Science.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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