Damon Carson: a man with a repurpose.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: SMALL biz

DAMON CARSON SHOPS FOR CLOTHES at thrift stores, spends Saturday mornings hitting garage sales and drives a Chevy pickup with 230,000 miles on it.

Not that he has to. Carson was still in his early 20s when he and a business partner launched a waste-hauling business in Breekenridge. They sold it to Waste Management in 2001 for somewhere in the "low single millions."

About a year ago Carson created a business called Repurposed Materials Inc., the idea being to take products deemed useless by one industry and find a buyer a new purpose -- for the goods in another industry.

"Hauling garbage all the lime, I knew what gets thrown away," says Carson, 40, who also owns Kiddie Rides USA, a restorer of vintage coin-operated rides for kids. "So this is my second foray into the waste stream of America."

It started with vinyl billboard signage discarded by advertisers. Carson took the 14-foot-bv-48-foot sheets with fading ads for Budweiser beer and the like and sold them to farmers on the Eastern Plains to use as tarps to cover hay. Soon Carson was scouring the country for old billboard signage to keep up with the demand.

Why stop with vinyl billboard signage? Carson thought. Repurposed Materials Inc. was born.

A year later at his 7,000-square-foot warehouse and rented lot near Colorado Boulevard and 38th Avenue, his inventory includes old street-sweeper brushes that ranchers are buying to use as scratching posts for horses and cattle; wine barrels from the Napa Valley repurposed as trash cans or decorative planting pots; rubber conveyor belts from coal mines repurposed as flooring for home gyms and padding for the walls of horse stalls; used roofing membrane from the Denver Mint repurposed as pond liners or other roofs; snow-break fencing from Wyoming sold as perfectly good, worn lumber. And much, much more, as they say.

Not everything Carson acquires ends up having a purpose somewhere else. He readily accepts his miscalculations. Three giant fiberglass dishes that were onee perched atop cell-phone towers are a case in point.

"I thought, 'Well, that's interesting enough,'" Carson says. "Maybe somebody will want one as a pond liner. Or you can flip it over and have a roof for a gazebo or something." Carson shakes his head. "Some things ... there's just not a market for them. You just try."

In its first full year, Repurposed Materials connected with enough buyers to generate $150,000 in revenue, Carson says. He's hoping for sales of $750,000 to SI...