Turning Trash Into Treasure

My father is totally hooked on golf. When he first started out, he couldn't afford to buy full club sets. Even used club sets were expensive. Then one day, while chasing down a bogey in the cabbage (whatever that means), he found a club head that had broken off from the shaft. These were pretty expensive brands, yet someone just decided they were worthless and threw them away. My dad figured out a way of getting used shafts for cheap, and just stuck the expensive club heads he found onto them using his vast arsenal of tools in his garage. One man's trash became my father's treasure.

Like my father, many artists today are using reclaimed material (trash), and turning them into works of art that could be sold in store. These works range from picture frames made out recycled glass, to sculptors made of scrap metal parts. More and more counter tops are now made from remnants rather than cutting whole new slabs. The best example of literally turning trash into a business would be TerraCycle. I mentioned TerraCycle in a previous post, and how they turned trash into soil fertilizer and used thrown out plastic bottles as their container.

The valuation of anything is subjective. One person saw a broken golf club, and saw it as useless. My father saw it as a new set of clubs. Be careful of the things you deem worthless; you might be throwing away a business opportunity.