Repurposing Materials: Civil Defense Priority

At Liquidator Sale Prices

A critical civil defense priority is to know how to repurpose materials. This is a critical survival skill mankind has used since time immemorial.

If, as Benjamin Franklin said, “Man is a tool-using animal” then materials are necessary to produce tools and to live a comfortable life.

We have forgotten that fact lately, but it no less true than it was in 1776 AD or 10,000 BC.

For a good idea of how to repurpose materials and for the reasons to do so, see the company website Repurposed Materials.

Damon Carson is the founder, owner, and capitalist genius who figured out that all those items going to the dump could be repurposed and reused by someone else…like you.

Here is brief piece from a Reader’s Digest article that details how Damon Carson repurposes materials to save you money.

“I kind of like the ugly in business, you know, the non-sexy,” he says.

Working, even peripherally, in construction, Carson had become familiar with an almost-everyday phenomenon: “You’d open up one of these big construction dumpsters and stuff would start falling out,” he says. He would find perfectly good planks of wood, or a window still clad in plastic from the factory.

“You can’t wrap your mind around how wasteful America is until you run a waste company,” he says.

Carson, a husband and father of three adult children, is far from wasteful. Frugal is how he describes himself. The clothes he’s wearing all came from a charity shop; his Ford truck was purchased with 290,000 kilometers on the odometer.

"You can’t wrap your mind around how wasteful America is until you run a waste company"

With his penchant for thrift and his exposure to excessive waste, he began thinking about creating a sort of secondhand hardware store that would sell surplus materials and keep them out of the waste stream. But his plans never came to fruition. Then, in 2010, an artist friend told him something that reignited his idea: The vinyl sheets used on outdoor billboards “make great drop cloths for painting.” Intrigued, Carson called a Denver out-door ad company. A few minutes and $140 later, he was the owner of 20 used billboard vinyls.

There is a solid environmental case for repurposing, or upcycling. “When people call, I say we don’t chip, shred, grind, melt,” Carson notes. Recycling, however noble, still takes energy; one estimate found it takes slightly less than half the energy to manufacture something from recycled steel materials than make it new.

These old fire hoses have been turned into bumpers for boat docks. Photo © Matt Nager 2022.

“Why grind something up, why melt something down, if it still has value?” he asks. An old oil-field pipe might be melted down and turned into a car bumper, but it still takes a fair amount of power to finish the transformation. Why not leave it as a steel pipe? Why not tilt it vertically and turn it into a fence post on a farm? The only cost is transport.

As Repurposed Materials grew, its website turned into a place where farmers, thrift-minded purchasing managers and everyday consumers puzzle over what to do with the unusual items that end up there.

Carson’s buyers often come up with their own creative reuses. When a police department in Florida called to order roughly 37 square meters of old conveyor belts, Carson says, he learned that, in the shooting world, ballistic curtains are three millimeters thick and go for about $30 a square meter. His conveyor belts were 12 millimeters thick and one-third the price. “They told me, ‘Your used stuff works better than the purpose-built,’” he says.”

Trust me on this one.

Repurposed Materials has items you need to keep a civil defense home.

The best part is that you will pay one-fifth what the Preppers pay for their toys.