You've Never Heard of My Favorite Inventor

Chris Koerner

He figured out how to convert old bread & plastic into billionsIn the 80s he was buying old bakery bread, crushing it into crumbs & selling to poultry farms.

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Then he thought "Hmm...what can I do with all these plastic bags?"

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As luck would have it, he was an organic chemist by trade.He started shredding the plastic bread bags and mixing with sawdust and thus...Trex was born. Today, Trex is the artificial decking manufacturer with a $10B market cap.Back in the day, the color of the planks...

...literally HAD to be the color of the plastic grocery bags they were melting!Then one day they processed a HUGE order of WalMart bags & it spit out aque blue planks that no one would buy...lolNow they know how to control the color. To this day, 50% of their planks are composed of grocery bags.The exact recipe and process is kept top secret, and they won't even write it down. A 2x6 takes 2,250 bags!They're building a $450m plant in Arkansas to continue scaling across the sunbelt.

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Much like Bill Gates was one of the only kids in the world with full access to a computer lab, this guy just happened to be an organic chemist. Some people are just destined to invent certain things. Thanks for being innovative, Roger Wittenberg.

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My favorite quote of his? "Recycling is the best way I know to make money."

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