34 YEARS AGO: Recycling - The individual approach

By Lyn Howe

Jan. 31, 1991, Ozark County Times - Ponch Van Camp and his wife, Marge, live between Thornfield and Longrun in a home built of recycled materials and lumber cut from trees on their land. Everything which went into building the house was recycled material except the tin roof.

“We are a wasteful nation. I saw them tear down good buildings and put up new buildings that weren’t nearly as good as the ones they tore down. In Kansas City, I used to tear down buildings; I got paid to tear them down, and I got to keep all the materials. Then money got tight, and I didn’t get paid, but I still got to keep the scrap. Finally, materials became so valuable that I had to pay to tear down buildings.”

Van Camp’s family moved to Thornfield from Colorado when he was 13. After two years in the Army, he moved to Kansas City (Mo.) and joined the fire department. He and his family visited Ozark County frequently. In 1967, the Van Camps bought a piece of property and built a cabin which they used for weekends and vacations.

When Van Camp retired from the Kansas City Fire Department in 1982, they moved their cabin permanently and made Ozark County their home.

One day, Van Camp saw John Heriford at the Heriford store [in Thornfield] taking two barrels of bottles and cans out to his truck. He asked what the store owner did with them and was told the barrels were emptied into an old silo. Van Camp says that many people in Ozark County used old silos or icehouses as places to put trash that wouldn’t burn or decompose. 

Van Camp offered to haul the stuff away. He told Heriford he would sell it and donate 10 percent to the Thornfield Volunteer Fire Department. Heriford agreed.

“Most of my life, I’ve been recycling,” Van Camp said. “As soon as aluminum cans came into use, we started right away to collect them to raise money for the Boy Scouts.”

Van Camp explained that “someone saw me picking up barrels at Heriford Store. He asked me if I’d leave a barrel at his house and pick it up when it was full. I said, ‘sure,’ and then another person telephoned me and asked for a barrel,” and a sideline business was born. 

“Helen Bruffet is a strong supporter of recycling,” Van Camp added. “She wanted to do something like this when she taught school, but there was no support for it then. I got more customers from her… she recruited all her neighbors, relatives and friends. Ruth Evans was another person who really pushed this idea.

“I picked up 4,200 pounds of baling wire from four dairy farms in Thornfield a couple of weeks ago. About twice a year, we clean up the baling wire. I have about 80 barrels out at almost 50 locations, both homes and farms. 

Van Camp takes all his glass, aluminum, steel and plastic to Tom-Bar Recycling in Mtn. Home. When he hauls a load of cattle to Springfield, he takes a load of scrap metal to a dealer who has a large crusher-compactor. 

“When I haul scrap metal like baling wire, 90 percent of the time I’m going anyway. That cuts down on my costs for hauling,” he explained.

“As I said [in the interview with Ed Filmer] on TV, if I had to raise a family, I couldn’t afford to do this. I make about 20 percent on what I sell to Tom-Bar.”

After the story about him appeared on TV, six more people called and asked him for barrels. Some people clean and sort everything, smash cans, others just pile it all together in the barrels. However he gets it, Van Camp sorts it out and stacks it up until he has enough collected to justify making a trip to Mtn. Home or Springfield.

Sometimes people give him old rusted-out trailers or pickup beds. He piles the scrap metal in those until they’re full, then he loads them onto his flatbed trailer and takes it all to Springfield for the crusher.

Using scrap to contain scrap; using materials from buildings which have been demolished to fashion a vacation cabin; pickup up cans littering the roadsides and selling them to raise money for Scouting — it’s all the same thing to Van Camp.

Use it up, reuse it and when there’s no further use for it, sell it to someone who can convert it into something which can be useful. 

***

Editor’s note: Ponch Van Camp was one of several local residents who were instrumental in organizing the Ozark County Recycling Center in its initial stages in the early 1990s.