In The NoCo

How one Colorado entrepreneur diverts millions of pounds of waste from landfills

By In The NoCo,

Published January 22, 2025 at 5:40 AM MST

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repurposedMATERIALS founder Damon Carson takes large scale items from companies and helps repurpose and resell items that would normally end up in the landfill. repurposedMATERIALS helps keep millions of tons of waste out of landfills every year. And the whole thing was inspired by a conversation about billboard vinyl.

Old firehoses. Used forklifts. Two-thousand sheets of acrylic plastic.

These are the kinds of things you can find at repurposedMATERIALS in Lafayette. The company acquires discarded industrial materials and products and resells them instead of sending them to a landfill.

Damon Carson founded the business in 2011 after running two trash companies. The repurposedMATERIALS location in Lafeyette is one of six locations across the country where he stores his unusual inventory and then ships it off once he finds the right buyer.

Damon Carson talked with In the NoCo’s Brad Turner about how he built the company.

Check out a recent profile of the business in The Denver Post.

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In The NoCo

KUNC's In The NoCo is a daily slice of stories, news, people and issues. It's a window to the communities along the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The show brings context and insight to the stories of the day, often elevating unheard voices in the process. And because life in Northern Colorado is a balance of work and play, we celebrate the lighter side of things here, too.

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Ariel Lavery

Ariel Lavery grew up in Louisville, Colorado and has returned to the Front Range after spending over 25 years moving around the country. She co-created the podcast Middle of Everywhere for WKMS, Murray State University’s NPR member station, and won Public Media Journalism awards in every season she produced for Middle of Everywhere. Her most recent series project is "The Burn Scar", published with The Modern West podcast. In it, she chronicles two years of her family’s financial and emotional struggle following the loss of her childhood home in the Marshall Fire.

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Brad Turner

Brad Turner is an executive producer in KUNC's newsroom. He manages the podcast team that makes In The NoCo, which also airs weekdays in Morning Edition and All Things Considered. His work as a podcaster and journalist has appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition, NPR Music, the PBS Newshour, Colorado Public Radio, MTV Online, the Denver Post, Boulder's Daily Camera, and the Longmont Times-Call.

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