Repurposed Materials adding staff, looking at national expansion

To Denver's Repurposed Materials, utility is in the eye of the beholder. Or, to use another cliche, one company's trash is another company's pond liners. In 2012, the company sold 1.7 million pounds of materials that was otherwise destined for the landfill.

Founder and Owner Damon Carson started in the garbage business in Summit County in the 1990s.

“We had a traditional garbage company – fill it up and take it to the landfill,” Carson says.

After selling the company to Waste Management, Carson relocated from the mountains to the Front Range and started Repurposed Materials in 2010, hiring his first full-time employee in June 2011.

“I had the opportunity to sell some old billboard vinyl and one thing led to another,” he says.

Customers repurposed billboard vinyl as tarps and pond liners, and Carson expanded into fire hoses,  pool covers, conveyor belts, barrels, artificial turf and reclaimed lumber. The company's footprint is national, but a “sizable chunk” of its materials are sourced from Colorado companies including Vail Resorts and MillerCoors, Carson says.

Customers envision new uses for the materials, he adds. A discarded pool cover “might look one way to an oil and gas person in West Texas, but it might look very different to a lumberjack in British Columbia.” To this end, conveyor belts have been repurposed as baseball backstops, street sweeper brushes as livestock backscratchers and fire hoses as dock bumpers.

Now six staffers strong, the company is looking to add one more employee in the next three months.

“Sales from 2011 to 2012 have doubled,” Carson says. “In the coming months and years, we're going to have several locations around the United States.”