When a custom rubber stamp manufacturer last week made a plea for people to take his factory’s scraps, the responses started bouncing in.
Nic Magnuson, who runs Magnuson Custom Stamps and helps lead operations at Unity Stamp Company in New London, Minnesota, said his companies throw out more than 200 pounds of clean natural rubber scraps each week. He reached out to mulch recyclers, playground surfacing specialists and more about taking the scraps, but no one wanted it. So, he took to Reddit, offering to ship out the rubber scraps to anyone who wanted it, just asking them to cover roughly $1 per pound in shipping costs.
Magnuson said the Reddit post has so far racked up around 6.6 million views and that he’s received hundreds of emails and DMs.
“I've been working through them one by one and I'm still not caught up. The variety of intended uses has been the best part,” he said in an email.
Magnuson said the requests include:
- An art professor in New York City wanting to experiment with it for sculpture
- A guy in Pittsburgh whose friend does custom glass fabrication and wants to use long strips to cradle delicate glass pieces on racks
- A musician building a custom bass guitar mute with swappable materials
- A teacher using it as packing material for a packaging-engineering class unit
- An engineering startup testing it as a gasket for a water-submersible irrigation sensor
- A fencing instructor filling sparring targets
- Someone in Utah making archery target backstops
- A nonprofit serving kids with disabilities using it for sensory and art projects
- A farmer wanting it as footing material for arenas and walkways
- A few people just using it as drainage layer in tall planters or as garden mulch
“It's a much wider net than I ever would have guessed. People have been creative,” he said.
Magnuson said he has already shipped out approximately 250 pounds, with another more than 400 pounds already committed to people on the waitlist. He said his operations trim about a 55-gallon drum of scrap a week, so he’s producing and shipping as fast as he can.
It’s a great way to keep waste out of the landfill, so reach out if you need any rubber.
