One Man's Trash with Kelly Warbis

Join Kosta and his guest: Kelly Warbis, CEO and Co-Founder of EKAMOR Resource Corporation.

With a mission to drastically reduce the major challenges of managing municipal solid waste, EKAMOR is working to change the world's management of waste from an extractive economy to a circular economy.

In this episode: Where does your trash go? Does recycling actually help the environment? What is carbon neutrality? Why do we hear about it so much? How is EKAMOR going to change the way we process trash in Cookeville and United States? 
 
Find out more about Kelly Warbis and EKAMOR:
https://ekamor.com/

Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a product of Morgan Franklin Media and recorded in Cookeville, TN.

This episode of Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is made possible by our partners at Wildwood Resort and Marina.

Find out more about Wildwood Resort and Marina:
https://wildwoodresorttn.com/

Transcript

Kosta Yepifantsev: 0:02

This episode is presented by our partners at Wildwood Resort and Marina, a one of a kind lodging dining and vacationing experience on Cordell Hull Lake, only 11 miles from I-40 and one hour from Nashville Wildwood’s all inclusive venue is the perfect location for weekend getaways, family celebrations, Team retreats and weddings. open year round Wildwood is the perfect place to unwind, recharge and renew. Whether you're spending the night on a floating harbor cottage, having a nightcap at Lakeside restaurant or enjoying a customized massage at Niagara Landing. There's something for everyone. Find out more at visitwildewood.com

Kelly Warbis: 0:43

Wow. So we've been talking about recycling for a long time. And the reality is maybe 14% that most of the recyclable material that's out there that can be recycled really gets recycled. It all ends up in landfill. And the reality is, is that and there's nothing against landfill operators, we need them civilizations got to have a place for our garbage to go. They make more money by burying our garbage than they do trying to sort out the materials and doing that with it.

Morgan Franklin: 1:17

Welcome to Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev, a podcast on parenting business and living life intentionally. We're here every week to bring you thoughtful conversation, making your own path to success,challenging the status quo, and finding all the ways we're better together. Here's your host, Kosta Yepifantsev.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 1:36

Hey, y'all, it's Kosta. Today I'm here with my guest, Kelly Warbis, CEO and Co-Founder of EKAMOR Resource Corporation, with a mission to drastically reduce the major challenges of managing municipal solid waste, EKAMOR is working to change the world's management of waste from an extractive economy to a circular economy. Kelly, first off, let's talk about something everyone is familiar with trash. We'll start with a regular bag in Cookeville, Tennessee, we filled up the bag and now it's time to take it out to the curb where the city of Cookeville will pick it up. What happens from there?

Kelly Warbis: 2:13

Soon as it goes into the truck. It arrives at our transfer station where it is dumped with all your neighbor's garbage. And then a big in loader picks it up and dumps it into a semi where it's hauled to the landfill in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Wow. And it just sits there. And it sits there eventually gets covered with some dirt on the landfill and will sit there forever.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:37

Is there a landfill in Cookeville?

Kelly Warbis: 2:39

There used to be okay, so

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:40

there is no landfill here in Cookeville.

Kelly Warbis: 2:42

There is a landfill. It's now construction and green waste correction debris.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 2:47

Gotcha. What if we changed the details of the story? Let's say we bag up that same trash. But this time it goes to eco more what happens to the trash?

Kelly Warbis: 2:58

Well, let's say instead of one bag, there's 100 bags, because that way, it's a little bit easier for us to see what happens. Okay, so instead of the 100 bags going into the landfill, eight bags would now go to the landfill. 14 of those bags would be recycled. Okay, but plastics, metals, that sort of material that's easily recycled. Sure 50 of those would become a clean fuel that can be burned for gasification to make green energy, green chemicals, sustainable aviation fuel, and that sort of thing. So that leaves 28 bags, if everybody was doing their math, what happens with a 28 bags, the 28 bags was full of water that our non thermal system took out of the garbage

Kosta Yepifantsev: 3:41

and evaporated and evaporated. Wow. So explain this to me. Okay. And we're going to talk a little bit about carbon neutrality. But I want to just focus on a few things that you've just said in the last statement. What is green energy? What are green chemicals. And when you say the water just evaporates, it just goes into the atmosphere. And when it goes to the landfill, it just gets soaked into the ground. Like give me a visualization of what you're describing?

Kelly Warbis: 4:10

Well, water is the biggest issue with garbage. Probably the highest cost. The garbage trucks get paid, the garbage companies get paid per ton to handle your garbage. So if I was a garbage company, the wetter it is, the more money I make. But if I'm a city or a community that has to pay to get rid of that, I'm paying a lot of money to haul water off basically. So in our garbage, it ranges anywhere probably averages about 40 to 43% of water in our garbage and people don't think so. But that's a lot of money when you're looking at hauling garbage every day out of your city at the landfill. Water is also the main problem. It allows an atmosphere or an environment for the bugs to keep me Late spread disease. Well, when I'm saying bugs more than biological activity, eating the organic matter, methane, okay, a lot of people don't realize it. Landfills are our third largest contributor to methane in the United States. And globally, yeah. And it's a lot more harmful than co2. Eventually, it goes to the atmosphere and eventually breaks down and co2, but it's a greenhouse gas emission. So in our process, we d water, the material, non thermally. But our material once it's below 15 16%, moisture, the biological activity stops, therefore, the methane stops. So in a sense, we have a green fuel, when we're finished with our process so we can provide to other people. And what is this green fuel look like? A brownish colored blown in insulation? Okay, it's fluffy, it is still garbage, if you're gonna do a chemical analysis of it. But physically, we change it from a putrified smelling material to a kind of a musty dry fluff material.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 6:04

Why would anybody buy green fuel?

Kelly Warbis: 6:08

Well, green is the you know, it's an issue worldwide, there's major pressure on fossil fuels. Garbage, once it's dried, has virtually been equivalent to how to River Basin coal from Wyoming, the BT value or the calorific value of the fuel is great. By us taking material and drying it, instead of it going to the landfill, we take about 1.7 tons of co2 out of the atmosphere by using it instead of letting it lay in the landfill. And therefore, that's where green becomes. So people that are burning fossil fuels are starting with something that fuel that's not green. And in their combustion and everything else, they're putting more carbon into the atmosphere just by the processes. So if they can start with something that is negative carbon, and still combust it, then they become carbon neutral, or maybe even carbon negative based on their processes.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 7:09

Okay, so who do you sell this product to? Or who do you plan to sell this product to? And what type of processes are they using to burn fossil fuels? And explain carbon neutrality? And also the importance of it and why we hear it so much?

Kelly Warbis: 7:27

Well, let's start with carbon neutrality, okay, most processes put carbon into the atmosphere. And that's bad because of global warming, because of global warming, okay, and the genies out of the bottle, right? It's everywhere. The problem is, is that when we come home at night, we want to be able to flip our light switches on and the lights come on, right? We want to open a refrigerator and our foods still cold. And you've got to have, you know, a good way to make energy or do that the challenge that I see is in making that exchange, there's people spending billions of dollars, trying to figure out how to get carbon out of the atmosphere, carbon capture, carbon capture trying to put it into different Yeah, capturing it, somehow sequestering it somehow. My thesis and that of our management team is why not take one of our largest carbon producing greenhouse gas emitting issue that's out there, use the material and keep it from becoming an issue in the first place. When you start trying to get carbon negative, you're trying to take the processes that affect carbon that add carbon, and create processes that are negative to bring that down to a neutral or negative number.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 8:45

So the best way just to summarize it, so people understand what we're talking about. If you are a factory that's burning coal, and the measuring units for how much co2 You're producing from burning that coal is say, 100, we're just going to use round numbers. They use your fuel instead of burning coal. And that offsets the 100 units that they produced in co2 from burning that coal crude. Okay, so if they're carbon neutral, essentially, what you're doing is you're saying, okay, look, at this point in time, I can't supply you with enough garbage, processed, you know, garbage to be able to meet the demand of fossil fuels, like coal and other stuff. But I can at least offset the amount that you're using. And then as I as this process becomes more and more advanced and becomes to scale, you might be able to transition all of your operations to using Eco Moore's trash, essentially.

Kelly Warbis: 9:50

Yeah, that's a correct statement in. In the EU, for example, it's driven by mandates. The mandates aren't here yet. You think they will be Yeah, okay, we may be 20 to 30 years behind that. But I mean, you look at what's happening on the East Coast, you look at what's happening in the west coast. It's working its way here. I mean, even in Tennessee, there's not going to be another new landfill built in the state of Tennessee. Wow, there was a Jackson law that was put in in the in the 90s. Because of that, there'll be no new landfills put in in Tennessee. So as rural areas we have here, you know, I moved here from Southern California that had a county of 3 million people, to Putnam County, lot of green lot acres. And we have a huge landfill issue in central Tennessee that a lot of people aren't aware of.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 10:44

So what is the issue? Well, the

Kelly Warbis: 10:46

issue is our largest landfill in the area, which is middle point landfill, will probably be closing down in less than four years. Oh, wow. And at that point, the garbage goes out to smaller landfills with less capacity. And they fall just like dominoes. So you know, some of the experts that I've talked to in central Tennessee, we may not have a place to go, we're very, very close proximity, a place to handle our garbage within the next eight to 10 years.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 11:19

We're going to talk about how you got into this. And it's a very interesting journey, a very interesting road. But I want to ask you one question, before we do. You said, mandates will apply in the United States in 20 or 30 years, do we have 20 or 30 years?

Kelly Warbis: 11:37

No, there's 1400 operating landfills today. And about 350 of them are due for closure in the next 10 years.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 11:46

But do we have enough time to affect the issues of climate change? And this is the only time I'm going to ask you so we're gonna tease this out. And then we're gonna move on sea level rise, I mean, droughts. There's flooding in New York City, I understand that natural progression of climate is that the world changes in terms of temperature, sometimes it gets hotter, sometimes it gets colder. But you've been in this business granted, maybe in one specific sector of this industry, but still, you've been around it for the last decade. In your professional opinion, do you think that we are about to witness some significant drastic and dramatic changes in our climate that's going to affect the way that we live? And do we have 20 or 30 years to start, you know, following the drumbeat of Europe?

Kelly Warbis: 12:39

Well, there's a lot of people that are a lot smarter than I am on that, I do believe that a lot of climate changes are historical. And, you know, we've gone through ice ages and droughts and everything else for millennia. So in the little time that I have here, to do this, the effect that I can cause is to go to the root problem here. Instead of trying to figure out how to suck co2 out of the atmosphere, I want to take something and turn it into a fuel that everybody can use and keep their lights on. economically. Yeah, instead of trying to do that if I do my little piece that I can do, and leave this world a better place than it was when I got here. That's, that's about all I can do. In 2016,

Kosta Yepifantsev: 13:26

you took a sabbatical to do something I personally believe is what separates the great innovators and thought leaders from everyone else. You went to work on the front lines, what did you learn about this industry firsthand, working as a garbage collector and a processor?

Kelly Warbis: 13:46

Well, I pierced the veil to really see what was, you know, behind the curtain of the waste industry. Okay. Basically, it started out as simple as following my recycle bin at my home in Southern California. And what I found was in that bin of recycled material, that was all recycled, all plastics, everything that was in there could be recycled, that nearly half of that still went to the landfill. Why? Well, I put my recycled material in bags. Okay. They had two shifts of 140 people at this facility working there was there was some automation but a lot of people that were paid to make 40 to 45 picks. And when I say a pick, they had to grab 40 to 45 items a minute off the belt. When a garbage bag went by, if they would have stopped to open it. They didn't have time to make their picks that they required to pick so every bit of my recycled material for years at that facility went right to the landfill. From the waste management side when I say Waste Management's not the company, it's just manage our waste. If it was more to see what happens when it goes from the curb to the landfill, what are all the steps? How many people does it touch? Those people all make money along the way. So when we roll a bin full of garbage out to our curb in the morning on garbage day, we hope it's empty when we come out, right? So I basically went around to figure out what all happens to that. And what's the reality, the reality is that there's not a lot of recycling. As much as we've been talking about it. My youngest daughter will be 41 years old soon. And when she was in kindergarten, I remember having to build a recycle bin at my home for magazines and newspapers. So we've been talking about recycling for a long time, right? And the reality is maybe 14%, that most of the recycled material that's out there that can be recycled, really gets recycled, it all ends up in landfill. And then and the reality is, is that and there's nothing against landfill operators, we need them civilizations got to have a place for our garbage to go. They make more money by burying our garbage than they do try to sort out the materials and doing that with it. So

Kosta Yepifantsev: 16:13

is it because it's just so labor intensive? It is okay, so it's just like they can't they can't hire enough people, because the value of what they're doing isn't commensurate for them to be able to hire and paying them to do it. Or I mean, what explain that statement.

Kelly Warbis: 16:27

Well, I think, to stay in business, you have to have more money coming in and you have money coming in, right? So if the easiest thing to do, is dump that garbage in a hole, right? Cover it with a little dirt every day. Yeah. And never worry about it again until you know somebody else's issue. That's that is the most inexpensive method to take care of garbage doesn't mean it's right now.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 16:59

What makes a once in a lifetime vacation for our family? That's something I ask myself every time Jessica and I sit down to plan our next family trip. Individually it isn't the food, activities, accommodations, or even destination. It's the stories, the laughter, the memories and quality time spent together that simply couldn't be recreated anywhere else. This summer, we spent our vacation with Wildwood Resort Marina in Historic Granville, as someone who has always loved the lake but never had sea legs for a boat I loved that we could choose from lodging at waterfront cabins, floating harbor cottages, vintage air streams or even their new two-story inn we enjoy daily walks on Tennessee's longest lake boardwalk, on-site massages, hiking to waterfalls, and finished each day with an incredible meal from Lakeside Restaurant. If you're looking for a venue to accommodate an upcoming wedding, family gathering, corporate or group retreat - Wildwood has three event spaces with spectacular lake views personalized with catering, AV-equipment, room darkening capabilities, excursions and much more. Tucked away only an hour from Nashville and 11 miles from I-40. Wildwood Resort is the getaway you've been searching for. For more information go to visitwildwood.com

Kelly Warbis: 18:38

Some things break down? But you know, we started this by what happens with the garbage right? You know, so all the water that's in there eventually seeps out to the bottom of the landfill. Most landfills today are mined. It creates something that we call lead sheet. Are those in the business? So it's any moisture water? You

Kosta Yepifantsev: 19:02

need? I'm just trying to get into the groundwater. No. It should be surely

Kelly Warbis: 19:09

if it's constructed properly. Okay. Are there issues with it? There's Superfund sites there's Yeah, I mean, there's major liability on the landfill. But if it's built correctly, no, but what happens is they have to pump that leach aid out every day. So like in Murphysboro at middle point. The leech eight gets pumped out. It goes to I believe it's Nashville, where all the wastewater in the metropolitan area goes. It

Kosta Yepifantsev: 19:39

just watching you Yeah, God.

Kelly Warbis: 19:43

So it goes through the sewer system. It goes it goes through the whole process again, and then they get as much water as they can out of it. And they bring that material back what's left over after they process it. So this is you talking about a circular economy. Sure. We chase made Every day, leachate gets hauled to the waste water facility every day. Yeah, what's left is they call it a cake. It's still probably 70% water or more, it goes back to the landfill and gets dumped in landfill.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 20:13

What happens to that lead chain?

Kelly Warbis: 20:14

When that cake goes to the landfill? Yeah, it's 70% water. That water will become leachate again, someday. It's a it goes on and on when

Kosta Yepifantsev: 20:25

they take this nasty water to Nashville, what do they do with it?

Kelly Warbis: 20:29

Well, they do what they do when you flush your toilet.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 20:32

Like the sewage treatment in the treatment facility, and then if so if you like drink from the tap with unfiltered water, you're just drinking like leaching

Kelly Warbis: 20:41

through water from somewhere else.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 20:44

Just goes into the Cumberland River, folks. I'm not gonna put words in your mouth.

Kelly Warbis: 20:51

But it's, but it's a crazy thing, right? You have rainwater. And so to get back, what happens to the garbage, some of it breaks down. Yeah, that's why we have methane. That's why landfills contribute. They're the third largest contributor to methane in the United States and globally, for that matter. Because that moisture that's in there is creating bugs creates heat, it eats the organic material. Methane goes into the atmosphere and it breaks down but they've done core samples of landfills old landfills in the Northeast, and you can read checks from the early 1900s. They tried to keep the air out when they seal it and they cover it and everything then and it becomes kind of a anaerobic stage. So some things are preserved and doesn't break down. But landfills over the years do shrink a little bit. That's how they can keep coming back in and adding a little more garbage because it will break down eventually.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 21:44

I want to talk about your co founder Michael Adel check. For anyone that doesn't recognize this name. Michael is one of the most accomplished engineers and celebrated voices in innovation across the globe, a leader of five divisions during his career at General Electric, he was on the front lines of creating world's first products that revolutionized health care and aviation. How did Michael start working with ACA more? And how is his perspective changed the company?

Kelly Warbis: 22:14

So I met Michael out of the blue, I had worked with a consulting company to raise some money back a few years ago, probably about four, four and a half years ago now. And this company reached out to Michael because Michael worked with a lot of venture capital firms, private equity firms, to vet technology before they invest in it. And he was doing these people a favor to call me up. Just say, Hey, I've heard about your technology. What can you tell me about it? So we started talking, I told him a little bit about it. Kind of a Funny conversation. He asked me where I had my engineering degree since he's got a degree from Columbia and two degrees from MIT. Oh, wow. And I said, I had mine from Calhoun County, Iowa. And he said Calhoun County never heard of such a school. And I said, No, it's a farm out in the middle. farmland in the Midwest. Yeah. And that began a relationship though he went radio silent on me for about three or four months, didn't return a phone call, didn't return an email. He called me a blue one day and he said, All right, I've got to figure it out. Let's go out, raise some money and do this. fascinate. So that's what's basically what started and I think what's changed our perspective, is that I'm an entrepreneur. So to me, it's about how much it costs. And what's my return. And Michael, instilled in me that, you know, we're a technology company, we're developing disruptive technology that can change how the world views waste. So with that, it was design of experiments, putting sensors in for recording data, putting all the reporting methods together. And then what do we do with that data? Once we have it, we did some runs this morning, we spent two hours after the runs breaking down the data. And we do these runs pretty well every day. But it's to create a baseline of things that are out there.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 24:07

What are these things? And what is the data telling you right now about the processes that you guys are doing?

Kelly Warbis: 24:14

Well, we record everything. We're a non thermal process, right? So we use whatever God gives us. There's days this summer where it was, you know, raining heavily while we're running material, the atmosphere should not be able to hold any more water. So what really are we doing? How are we super saturating saturated air to be able to still dry material working with Oak Ridge National Labs and MIT we've developed or we've come to several different conclusion on on what we're doing. And so, you know, on a dry day, that's we don't get very often around here, but if we could get a 90 degree day with no humidity, good luck, you should be able to dry. But on a day that it's 90 degrees and raining out there, how do we do it. And basically, what we do is we super saturate the air, we make clouds inside of our systems, really. And those clouds pull the moisture, you know, right out.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 25:18

So what you're saying is, it doesn't matter what the conditions are outside. If it's wet and humid, you can still complete your processes, right. And that's what you're measuring. Using the sensors is to determine because, you know, when we toured your facility, and we looked, you know, the conveyor belts, and we saw trash, and we saw, you know, the rare earth mineral extract portion, and then where it goes up and it gets dried, we saw the finished product, we saw it all. Are you trying to create something that only eco more does? Or are you trying to create something that you can then license to other companies and other facilities and other countries? Because it sounds like when you say groundbreaking, disruptive and transformational? It sounds like that?

Kelly Warbis: 26:09

Yeah, it's all the above, because of what we're looking at moving forward. I mean, it's, we've had people here from Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, in Cookeville, in Cookeville, nice, Canada, and then major cities all there's lots of parts of the world, I don't really care if I'm there to operate the system. You know, we'll do licensing agreements and stuff like that. And that's, you know, when he talks about what's Michael brought to that GE licensed technologies all over the world. And it's having that perspective to understand that and how to put those together. So Kelly,

Kosta Yepifantsev: 26:44

here's the million dollar question. I have talked at length on multiple podcast episodes about having a company or an industry come to this area that is going to be a part of the 21st century economy. That's essentially a part of the future. Now, there are a lot of companies that get brought up like Google and Tesla and Facebook and data centers and Giga factories. And we need this we need that. People talk about retail shops like Target and then you know, you hear the regular players like Averitt and Feitosa, and Academy sports. I've never heard of echo more intel, we reached out and made a connection. I toured your facility. You are literally doing what I bring up in multiple episodes in the past. So why have I never heard of echo more intel today?

Kelly Warbis: 27:40

Well, it's pretty much been intentional. Okay. The waste industry, or one of the things that I've found, is basically ran by a couple of 800 pound gorillas, okay. It is the company waste management, it is Republic Services, it is two or three other companies. For us. This is really a feedstock acquisition play. Because now that you can dry it, right, you've got to get the feedstock sounds kind of crazy, you know, everybody out to give you garbage. But they've got long term contracts and all these municipalities and you know, where's the easiest place to go? That's one of the things that I looked at, when I spent six months in the waste industry was worse, the easiest place for me to plant the flag and not wake up the sleeping giant.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 28:27

And that happened to be Cookeville. Tennessee. Well, it's

Kelly Warbis: 28:29

in Cookeville. I'm not giving, I'm not gonna say

Kosta Yepifantsev: 28:35

no trade secrets here.

Kelly Warbis: 28:37

Cook will is I was looking for a reason to get out of Southern California. And Cookeville. My wife's from Tennessee. Okay, and Cookeville worked Nice. So through some mutual friends, I have found a person here. The county was interested in trying to do something different than send all the garbage to the landfill. And so we did waste out it. We did a lot of things. And you know, we call it home now.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 29:04

That's great. And I mean, here's the thing, I can't wait to get trash out of my house, like I will go out of my way to just throw stuff away. You're saying it's hard to get trash? And I'm saying I know a lot of people who gave you trash? Yeah.

Kelly Warbis: 29:18

Well, I don't want you and everyone else just come into our facility to do it.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 29:23

I mean, but if are you saying that you have a hard time getting trash?

Kelly Warbis: 29:26

No, I'm just saying that we're at the process right now. We're we're going to market. So when you're talking to a community, there's a lot of them just like Putnam County, everybody's the same. They're these are elected officials. This is new technology. This is disruptive technology. And I think one of the things that we discussed when you were here the first time as well. It kind of looks like you've been ready to do this. Why aren't you in the market? Right? And a lot of it is is putting the science together, working with the Department of Energy working with large engineering firms. To get them to vet our technology to understand what we're doing, so that when we go to a municipality, large or small, elected officials do not want to get unelected. Correct. And what we're doing is putting together something to give them the comfort and bringing our system into their market.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 30:19

Absolutely. Echo Moore's process will revolutionize how we handle waste, reducing landfill dependence by up to 90%. How does improving our systems of waste management improve our community?

Kelly Warbis: 30:33

Well, I think a couple of ways one is just in we become a green community, we're not sending it to a landfill and for every tonne of garbage, producing 1.7 tonnes. And that's hard to it's hard to fathom what that tonne is, but say, the county of Putnam County, if our garbage goes to landfill, it puts enough co2 in the atmosphere, it's about the same as the emissions from 26,000. Automobiles. Wow. And it's about the same carbon that can be sequestered by planting nearly 2 million trees as seedlings, and grown for 10 years. That's every year. Yeah. So our system now automatically affect garbage doesn't go to the landfill. That's how much carbon it's taken out every year, year in year. So

Kosta Yepifantsev: 31:20

we're doing our part. Yeah. And it's it's fascinating to me is that one of the biggest issues when it comes to affecting climate change, you know, global warming, whatever you want to call it, releasing carbon into the into the atmosphere, is behavioral modification, as the hardest thing, you know, like you said, everybody wants to come home, they want to flip their light switch on, they want the lights to come on, they don't care how they how the energy gets there, they just want it there. But what you're doing is you're saying, Okay, listen, I have come up with a completely new process that you don't have to modify anything, I'll do all the heavy lifting. I'll do all the legwork. Don't change anything. I got it, I got to figure it out. And, you know, I believe that there's a lot of applications when it comes to combating some of the shifts in our environment, that people are very smart people like yourself and others are using these this new technological advances to be able to positively affect the things that we just won't change ourselves. So when you say our dependence on landfills will be cut by 90%. Are you saying that if your system or when your system works when Atmore goes live, and you start rounding up garbage? That we're not going to have a landfill anymore? No, we'll

Kelly Warbis: 32:32

still have a lamp. How

Kosta Yepifantsev: 32:33

big will the landfill like? What's your goal for reducing the size of the landfill and Murphysboro?

Kelly Warbis: 32:38

Well, it's okay to keep it open. Right? I just want to keep it open forever. The only stuff that I want to have go there are things that don't cause environmental challenges. Okay, like bio, didn't know not material, biodegradable stuff is the problem with that's what creates the methane and biodegradable, it's not good. That's the bugs.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 33:01

What goes let's see, this is what I just don't know. I have been taught this my whole lot biodegradable, it's okay to throw a banana out the window when you're driving because it biodegrade?

Kelly Warbis: 33:11

Well, as it degrades, there's bugs that you don't see. So when I say bugs, it's just the organic matter decomposes. As it decomposes, it makes methane, the only things you want going into the landfill, or things that don't decompose. You want the concrete, the dirt, maybe pulverized glass, the inert materials to go to the landfill. I guess what we're trying to do is, I always tell people, it's easier to pull a rope than it is to push a rope. Well, we've been trying to make people recycle for the last 40 years. It's not happening. Any major effect. You know how to football coach in high school, keep it simple, stupid, don't think so much. And that's really my approach to everything. Why I have two or three garbage bins because most of the people will throw you know contaminated stuff and something that's not supposed to be contaminated. For eco more our process, we go to a municipality, let us pull out the stuff that's easy for us to pull out.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 34:11

And if it's in a garbage bag, it doesn't even matter anyway, because it's not getting recycled. So

Kelly Warbis: 34:15

yeah, they're getting better at that. But yes, that's I mean, we, they are but yeah, I mean, that's the process. So we're not recyclers. If you look at a Material Recovery Facility, millions and millions of dollars, conveyors, going everywhere, trying to get every water bottle, trying to get every piece of film plastic. Our approach to it is keep it simple. You know what throw everything you want to in your garbage bin at home, make something that's a cost center for the municipality, a revenue generator. For us, our whole process is keeping it simple. We feel that we can do that because let us pull the recyclables out of there. We know which one's worth more than it's a commodity film plan. See tomorrow, but maybe worth more than water bottles are today. And that changes month in month out all the time. If we miss a water bottle, it's not a big deal. It has a lot of BT value to us. So we don't spend several million dollars trying to get every water bottle out. But at the end of the day, we will pull more recyclables out overall than what most people are doing by trying to what they call single stream recycling and things of that nature. So that's basically it in a nutshell, try to make it simple. We've taken a complex system from a on the front end of our facility is basically a Material Recovery Facility. They call it merps in the industry, but we do it streamline. We've worked with some groups in out of Europe to take all the nonsense and cost out of things and keep it real simple. Metals are easy to get out. Aluminum is easy to get out. Water bottles are easy to get out. Milk jugs are easy to get out if something's not really easily be it out, but it creates BT value. The truth of matter is everything that can be recycled always has an end of life and will end up in a landfill one day, if it isn't the first time it gets used. It may be the second it may be the seventh. So if we miss something today, and it goes in as a fuel, at least we're creating green energy or green chemicals with and that's kind of our approach to

Kosta Yepifantsev: 36:25

it. Yeah, instead of it going into landfill instead of it going into it. So your goal is to reduce the size of this landfill by 50%. By 75%.

Kelly Warbis: 36:35

I'd say right now our goal is to keep a landfill open. Okay, it's reducing the amount of waste that goes to the landfill. I see. But it's keeping the landfill open.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 36:45

Okay, we need landfills. But we need the inner materials, we do not need all of the unnecessary waste that will turn into co2. Instead, we should give it to you. And you will turn it into green fuel and green chemicals. Before we wrap up, I want to talk about where ectomorph stands today. And where do you expect the company to be this time next year?

Kelly Warbis: 37:10

That's a really good question. So where we're at today is just at the beginning of commercialization. I've told you we've had people from all over basically the world come in and come to Cookeville, Tennessee, most of them only spend a night here. But a lot of people have came to see us the over the past, really 2023 This year, we've had the most come in. We are at the point where we're putting a lot of proposals together. Within the next year, we will have probably two municipalities where they're at I can't say that's okay. But we'll probably have two municipalities operating as well as a couple of private, not really garbage more in the paper mill industry that ends up in a landfill as well. Wow. So there's, there's more applications and you know, stuff that ends up in the landfill. But that's where we'll be probably,

Kosta Yepifantsev: 38:07

I love it. You know, you got that big factory next to the factory that you already have. So your goal is to box that puppy in and expand your services. Well, we

Kelly Warbis: 38:16

haven't made any commitments on that yet. Okay.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 38:19

We always like to end the show on a high note, who is someone that makes you better? When you're together?

Kelly Warbis: 38:27

Well, I'd be remiss to say that my wife is probably the number one person that makes me better when I'm together. She's actually my business partner. When I say business partner, she's always been my sounding board. You know, we've had several businesses and she's been the main cause of success for those businesses all along the, you know, along the way. So she's, she's the one that keeps me grounded. But we've put together a real interesting management team, they all have one focus in mind. And that is to change the way the world views garbage and manages waste. And most of us talk every day. But when we are together, the synergy that's in that room and the commitment that we all have, and these are all people that don't need a job. They don't need to be doing what we're doing. Trust me when I say Michael idle chick, you know, how does how does somebody like me? Take a person that's one of the top 10 engineers in the world and land and Michael idle chick, and he can do anything that he wants to, at all whatever he wants, if nothing's it, that he doesn't have to do it. He wants this to be his legacy. And so when all of us are in a room, it's magic. When we're together, we know we're gonna change the world.

Kosta Yepifantsev: 39:53

Thank you to our partners at Wildwood Resort gotta go with mom. and Marina for presenting this episode. Wildwood Resort offers guests a rare collection of lodging styles from vintage airstreams and waterfront cabins, to floating harbor cottages and a new two story inn. It's the perfect destination to visit this fall to explore nearby hiking trails and waterfalls. Walk on Tennessee's longest lake boardwalk, enjoy authentic dining at the Lakeside Restaurant, be energized with an on-site massage treatment. Wildwood is tucked away off the beaten path, nestled in nature. This is a hidden gem. For more information go to visitwildwood.com

Morgan Franklin: 40:40

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev. If you've enjoyed listening and you want to hear more, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Leave us a review or better yet, share this episode with a friend. Today's episode was written and produced by Morgan Franklin post production mixing and editing by Mike Franklin. Want to know more about Kosta visit us at kostayepifantsev.com. We're better together. We'd like to remind our listeners that the views and opinions expressed during this episode are those of the individual speakers and do not necessarily represent or reflect the official policy or position of this show its producers or any related entities or advertisers. While our discussions may touch on various topics of interest, please note that the content is intended to inspire thought provoking dialogue and should not be used for a substitute for professional advice. Specifically, nothing heard on this podcast should be construed as financial, legal, medical or any other kind of professional advice. We encourage our listeners to consult with a professional in these areas for guidance tailored to their specific circumstances.