Litter Gitter Genius: How To Embrace The Suck For A Cleaner World With Don Bates
Waterway litter removal isn’t easy—it’s messy, underfunded, and often overlooked. But for Don Bates, founder of Osprey Initiatives and inventor of the Litter Gitter, that’s exactly why it matters. In this episode, we explore how Don has built a mission-driven company that thrives by embracing the suck—transforming neglected urban streams, engaging underserved communities, and revolutionizing recycling in regions where systems are broken or nonexistent. With deep Southern roots and over 25 years of environmental consulting experience, Don shares how passion, persistence, and process are changing the way we tackle litter and drive circular solutions in the places that need them most. From repurposing event waste at the Super Bowl to bringing recycling infrastructure to towns with no curbside pickup, his team is proving that real innovation doesn’t wait for perfect conditions—it builds in spite of them. This is a story about legacy, leadership, and why the hardest problems are often the most worth solving.
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Litter Gitter Genius: How To Embrace The Suck For A Cleaner World With Don Bates
Osprey Is Revolutionizing Recycling - Let's Hear More About How
In our next episode of the show, we go beyond the headlines and into the details of the program plans submitted by Circular Action Alliance in Oregon and Colorado. These aren't just policy documents, they're operational blueprints for how producers will fund, manage, and improve recycling statewide. We break down these first-of-their-kind plans that are designed to drive real improvement in each market.
I'm here with Don Bates. Thank you so much for being here. We're excited to have this conversation. Don and I met, I guess it's been almost four years ago now, back when I was working at Coca-Cola, maybe 2019, I'm not really even sure. I was hooked. I always joke that Osprey Initiatives is my favorite company when I tell strangers about you guys. I'm super excited to have you on the show and hear your story.
You are the founder and owner of Osprey Initiatives LLC and the inventor of the Litter Gitter, which we'll talk a little bit more about what that is. You're a graduate of Millsaps College, and you have over 25 years of experience in the environmental consulting business. You're born in Hammond, Louisiana, and grew up in the swamps around Manchac. Is that how you say it? Manchac, Louisiana.
We're eight generations now.
That’s amazing.
We've been in that water a long time.
The Litter Gitter came from your experience as well, growing up there, which we'll get into. That's where really where you built your passion around waterways and maintaining and proving our natural resources is being there and growing up in this beautiful space, and also seeing it change sometimes for the worse. Now you're doing an incredible amount of work to change it for the better. I'm super excited to hear about the legacy that you've been leaving and that you are here to leave for future generations, and the access to wild places that you are able to change back to being no longer negatively impacted by humans. Thank you so much for being here. We'll start with, share your side. I read your bio. Who is Don, and how do you live with intention?
Early Litter Encounters & The Rise Of Disposable Materials
It's exciting. You got to see us from the very beginning, where it was just concept stuff. You always think about how you got to where you are. It's been interesting. I've been very fortunate. I've worked with some great companies that helped billed me to the chance to start Osprey, but I'm 55. Literally, I'm one of the younger people that remembers return for deposit bottles. There was no plastic was bakelite, and things along those lines.
We got to see, I remember the first disposable glass models when those came on the round ones with a little styrofoam sleeves. Even tin cans, like the aluminum can, came in the ‘70s. I think people littered back then, but I think we just didn't have the materials that were resistant to decay. We see them now. We got to see it. It has just gotten ahead of us. I was able to start my career as an environmental consultant. I was able to train in using data and information to actually solve the problem.
If you have a gasoline leak in the soil, you don't treat it for lead. You're specific. I've just been picking up litter for the last 30 years from river cleanups and things. My family goes back generations in the swamps of Manchac, Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, commercial fishing, and working in the plants. I've also always seen the blend of industry and jobs. No offense. We cannot all live in yurts and grow our own guards.
I don't think we're going back to that. We most want to. Just to feel like you do have an obligation or responsibility, mainly to leave a legacy just to your children, if nothing else, but everybody's children that they should be able to go out at the moon and be in a wild place and be able to grow 45 miles outside of New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the coolest big cities in the world. Our camp is 45 miles in the swamp, just right there.
Litter: You have an obligation, a responsibility, mainly to leave a legacy for your children, if nothing else, so that everybody's children can go out to the moon and be in a wild place.
To see that dichotomy of two worlds that can coincide and embrace each other, it was always been interesting. It began the concept of protecting wildlife. I'm a conservationist. I don't consider myself an environmentalist. I think we have to blend the use of our resources with smart growth to build for this increasing population in society. It's all part of it. How do we do that smartly, happen to it with a purpose, hold each other accountable, but then allow smart development and use of our resources?
We must blend the use of our resources with smart growth to build for this increasing population.
Love it. That's great. I've been to New Orleans many times, but I haven't been to the swamps outside very many times. Just a couple of times. I did do a couple of swamp tours, but it is amazing how fast you move into that nature right there. It's not that far away.
It is so close. There are alligators in New Orleans, but that's the swamp and the lights of the city, and literally have been in the swamp coming out at night, getting turned around, and you lose the lights of New Orleans to know that's East. “There's New Orleans, and I can get out into the darkest, blackest swamp.” It's really a cool place and a beautiful, serene, wild place.
Navigating Stakeholders: A Lesson In Timing And Respect
You've influenced a lot of change in your career. One of the things that we talk a lot about on the show is the fact that there are a lot of stakeholders involved in sustainability, and they are all at different points in their understanding of what's needed and what's a reality. What does it mean to be using our resources smartly? You've been able to bring together a cross-section of stakeholders across corporate, nonprofit, and government, and really implement things that are beneficial for all of those parties. Can you talk a little bit about how you influence those stakeholders and then really effectively like implement something when you have so many points of view?
I'll tell you, to be honest, I think 45-year-old Don Bates was better at it than 25-year-old Don Bates because I'm a passionate person, sometimes to a fault. I think I had to grow in maturity to respect timing and then respect other people where they were in their timing and what boxes they were having to deal with. One thing I tell people, too, is, “Literally everything you do in your life is training for your next level.
If you're not embracing the suck, the pivot, the change, and what are you learning.” I led the response in Mississippi for the company I worked for Hurricane Katrina, which was an upset condition. There was no plan. You were dealing with the Corps of Engineers, and we're doing all these people, and we're just everybody's at each other.
I read a tremendous book at that time called Rising Tide about the flood of 27. It gave me some insight A, into New Orleans, but B, into the Corps of Engineers and what their responsibilities are and how their thought process worked. Instead of me treating them, and they were our client, but instead of me treating them adversarial, I started respecting what that person was dealing with to get his job done.
It really galvanized this concept that we were in a situation that was a lot bigger than a profit margin or just getting this was people's lives getting back in order. To see that come together with very different and FEMA was in the middle of it, and all these people just fighting. We're all good people. This person is not a monolith. The guy at the corporate, we're all. That was, I think, twenty years ago this year, Hurricane Katrina. It's crazy.
That's wild. I remember it.
I began the process, and I had a great mentor when I started the office for Thompson Engineering in Jackson, Mississippi, twenty-something years ago. That's who I left to start Osprey. My partner, a guy named Bobby Mosley, 40 years with the DOT, and I were young and fired up. If I'd lost a contract, I had to go fix it. I had it, and Bobby just said, “Wait.” He taught me to meet people where they were. I think that has been a key part of our business, especially in a business that isn't an existing business.
We're not a washing machine company. My washer went out, I got to go buy a new one. We're the only company, maybe in the world, that builds their gear and maintains their gear and now consults on the best use of that gear and the data and all that piece of it. It's not something that people have a line item for in their budget. We just had a call. Our last meeting was with this group two years ago, and they reached out.
They need a proposal because the timing is right. I think one of the key parts is listening to what people are trying to accomplish. We work a lot with state and local governments, and they have a responsibility bigger than litter. A lot of people get frustrated about the litter, but their job is for drainage. These storms that are coming through these days, and if you're flooding people's houses, most of the houses that are getting flooding are in underserved communities.
I'm sorry, people's lives and limbs are going to trump the aesthetics of litter in the water. We have to respect that. I think what's helped us build these, and also the groups, aren't at odds as they used to be with the Clean Water Act, and all people are having to sue each other to get action. There seems to be a lot more partnerships out there. If you bring that, what's the vision? What are we trying to accomplish together? What's neat is that we work with groups and a lot of our communities.
Maybe it's a community, maybe it's an industry, maybe it's a nonprofit with the water. Over here, they're fighting potentially in the courts over a water issue or whatever. Over here, we can go pick up a litter together and at least respect each other as people, while we all have our missions and what we're trying to do. I think that's been one of the key factors with us is that we've helped folks craft their vision, so people know what they're shooting at, and also how you can have small short-term setbacks that don't impede the whole project.
That's a key. Vision starts and finding good people that can get behind the vision. Folks that won't get behind a positive vision also alienate themselves. Sometimes that's fine. Get them out of the mix and we'll keep you engaged. If you cannot come in here and work focused on this, it's really hard to keep those groups engaged. It's been fun. That's where it's like a business standpoint. It's a delineator for us because people here realize we're not here to cash a check and leave. We are a for-profit business, but we operate in the mindset of we have a mission, and our funding covers the increase of our footprint and our mission. We want to cast a bigger footprint. We want to live up to our goals as a company. We do that through revenue that allows us to increase our footprint.
Inventing The Litter Gitter & The Turning Point
I love that. That's so great. Vision, respecting their priorities. I like the concept of respect as an aspect of that, and listening to what people are trying to accomplish. Those are great suggestions. There's a story that I want you to tell. I'm going to seed you along into this because the story always gives me goosebumps, and then you can add on to it.
One of the things that I think is so powerful about what you guys do is if people have been listening to this podcast, we've been talking a lot about extended producer responsibility, which is happening and has momentum and has been passed in five states and now it's looking like two more are going to be passed, will have been at least passed in our Looking Ticket signature. The point is, there is a lot of momentum out there around making this shift to change the investment strategy around recycling.
However, that is not where you are generally operating. You are generally operating in places where there is very little recycling. In the state of Louisiana, I think the recycling rate, according to a report, is 4%, which is very low. Your headquarters are in Mobile, Alabama. There's this story about when you like in Mobile, you were able to put in all of these Litter Gitters around the city and you basically eradicated the litter issue in Mobile. You're putting it, like you said, a lot of times, the litter shows up in these low-income communities. There was this one time you were going to check on the Litter Gitter, and I'll let you finish the story.
It was the epiphany for me because, for some reason, it can be a very negative world around litter and recycling. You can get down, and you can get into the mullet grubs and the complaining and the useless. It was actually, we were just starting. I was still working for Thompson Engineering. He's just a great company. Thought I was going to retire. We had done 200 bags of litter out of a quarter-mile section of this urban stream called Maple Street Tributary. That's when I invented the litter gear.
We were sitting there, this great visionary lady named Roberta Swann, is the director for the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program here in Mobile. They led the cleanup. We were just a green team supporting this cleanup. We did all the work. That's when the concept for the Litter Gitter came up. I said, “Roberta, the litter is coming out of this culvert. We're just chasing it a quarter mile down this stream. If I could put a small trap at that culvert, I think I could make it easier to come and get the litter every time it rains. We'll come get it.”
She said, “What are you waiting for?” We had mud in our ears. One of the person had fallen into this nasty water. I literally stopped at Walmart and bought some pool noodles, went by Home Depot, got some chicken wire, and made the first litigator. Talking to Roberta about it, she loved it. I made another one. That was the prototype. It's a prototype that's hanging at the shop. I made another one, actually, before it ever rained from that cleanup. It was able to put this litigator out at this whatever, a little double 48-inch box culvert that was dumping all this litter. I put it out all good. I was cleaning it.
I didn't have my permits. I had to sneak it in later on a permit for the poor city of Mobile, who has been just our absolute partner. We haven't ended litter in Mobile. We're just fighting it at a higher level than we did. We don't want to claim total. Anyhow, so I put this trap out and it's working. I've got the picture of the first rain. The litigator is working. Life's good. Two weeks later, a twelve-foot alligator ate that trap.
We had to run that alligator out. I got a video of him. He was beautiful. I got a video of me running that alligator off. He was awesome. Another couple of weeks later, I think it was a Sunday morning or Saturday morning, I guess I was doing on the weekends or before work. It was like a Saturday. I go down there to clean my trap, and there's a guy from the neighborhood and his kids, and he's got a weed eater and he's doing something, and I'm like, “This guy's messing with my stuff.”
My family's all commercial fishermen, and the rule in commercial fishing, you don't touch somebody else's stuff. I boil out the truck like, “What's going on?” Here's this guy that fits every demographic in an underserved community that doesn't care about the environment. Total stereotypical, not true, but the standard story. He literally says, “My kids like to come down here and feed the turtles, and whoever's keeping this litter out of here is killing it.” The weeds had grown up around the end of the culvert for people to see the water.
I said, “I thought I'd come down here and we'd eat.” It was one of those, I still get emotional about it because it was this. Everybody says you're wasting your time with litter, just going to come back, but not to him and not to his kids at one. That was my deal was to get positive because I'm not doing it for the Jack wagons on Facebook. I could care less with them what I have to say. It's that man in that community wanting to show his kids the turtles and God probably fits the demographic of somebody's not going to go spend two weeks at the beach every year financially, but this was their green place.
At the end of the day, that's the green place I grew up in, the swamp, the ditches in Hammond, Louisiana, my brother and I catching turtles and frogs and crawfish and now alligators in these ditches. I saw myself and those kids, because I could come see that little swamp every day of the week. It was my epiphany moment to stay positive, know the why of what you're doing this for. It's not for accolades, and it's not for a war. We get them. We get a lot of that stuff, but it's mainly for that kid one day to not even know, but that was going to be his little place that maybe one day he brings his kids back there. This is where I used to catch tadpoles when I was a kid. Again, that was probably six years ago.
That's great.
I'll probably end up buying that site one day. There's some vacant land right there just to put a park and to say, because we've had multiple folks come in. It was a dump site. When we first started there, the roof and shingles it was an illegal dump. Now we keep it. It's a park. We led into some of our work. We had put the test out, and a manager from the EPA came down. I got in Chris, who passed away recently.
A great guy. He was brought to that site with me and another person, and when Rick Frederick showed him the spot, he was like, “This isn't the spot you brought me to two years ago.” He said, “No, this is the spot we brought you to.” He dropped a couple. He said, “You're f'ing with me. Quit lying. This is not. There was no way possible. By the way, you must've cleaned it yesterday.” I'm like, “We hadn't been here in two weeks.” That's when he said, “We've got to get more of these.”
We and Christine, those stories of that type of response to our business, but also helping people fulfill what they're already trying to fill. They've now become quite commonplace. That's our story as a company. Again, that's the deal for our team members to get to see that and the joy now they're getting when they're making an impact. That's really what drives this company. You'd better bring your passion to the Osprey team, or you're probably at the wrong place.
Litter: You'd better bring your passion to the Osprey team, or you're probably at the wrong place.
Beyond Litter Gitters: Building Infrastructure Where None Exists
On that note, so you have been able to build infrastructure in places where it doesn't exist and prove to people who might have been naysayers or couldn't see the value that you were going to be able to create from this. What's the hardest thing about making that type of change or building something, an infrastructure from nothing that requires a lot of players, like the thing that you've learned?
To me, as we started this company, there was the investment side. People think, “This is a gold mine. You got something investable here.” We have never taken that route. We have decided we would rather grow slowly organically with our people and offer them the opportunity to franchise and go move to another location and start the office.
Also, as you're building your craft for a company like Coca-Cola to put their trust in us, you know they protect that brand and they protect the optics of their company. We've used that as if we're doing it at that level, our product is being done at a high level. The acceptance of our work has been remarkably easy, people like it, but funding doesn't exist in a lot of places. You have to be creative with the funding. That's where partners like Coca-Cola and some of these other corporations we work with are great for starting that project, funding it for a year, proof of concept.
We're seeing very often that the cities are then funding it, or other groups are funding it. Being creative on your funding. It is a big deal, and funds are always what you have to chase. I never wanted to outgrow our talent, but we're right at the edge, and we stay at the edge, and we're up to 24 people. We've become a process company. The Litter Giver, everybody hears about us from the Litter Gitter. We've now invented these recycled tables that we're using for event recycling. They're just killing it.
Being creative with funding is crucial; you're always chasing funds.
The reusable bags.
The reusable bags with a clear stream for selling hundreds of those that we use to what can we smartly divert from a landfill. What's the concept? Try it. Don't be afraid to break it. We're crushing glass, making all this stuff out of concrete now. We're getting ready, and we're ADD. We're always coming up with weird ideas. We've got all these wooden pallets. We're breaking them down.
We get a lot of this Styrofoam out of the water. The thing we're getting ready to make is we're thinking about taking a wood pallet and just putting sheets of plywood on each side of it for the form. We're going to make a concrete out of Styrofoam and Portland cement and fill that wood pallet with that slurry. Let it harden, and try to have a lightweight building panel that we can use in the ceiling. We were playing with that.
You're a process company, but you're largely an innovation company sometimes.
It's weird. I never thought.
Also, the other thing is you talked about how easy the response was, and I don't think you give yourself enough credit sometimes for how quality your data is. I don't mean you all, it's just so natural to you guys to be so quality in how you measure and how you report that that's like so ingrained in your culture that you forget that that is like I think one of the reasons that it's so easy for people to totally understand what you're doing and see the value because you all bring that level of detailed accuracy to taking waste out of waterways, which you don't see at any of your competitors if you can even call them competitors.
That's bags. How many bags did you get? Boring. I think that was our delineator. That's what really helped us win the opportunity at the Super Bowl this year, which was a great event. We did things that have never been done before in those venues. That's again, one of those little things. Embrace the suck. It's just such a piece because that's a delineator these days. We won our first big win.
Litter: Embrace the suck. It's just such a piece because that's a delineator these days. That's what's going to separate you from the other folks
What do mean by embrace the suck? Like, embrace the hard stuff? Embrace the things that suck?
Yeah.
That's so funny. I love that.
That's what's going to separate you from the other folks. Our folks laugh. I think people look at us literally. We just got our deal. We're going to be doing the Tennessee Titans recycling. Lauren Williams, one of our friends who started on a project as a number two student in Cincinnati, now runs a lot of our recycling. We're at this grand opening of the new contract for the Tennessee Titans, Coca-Cola, all this stuff.
Literally, the buzz and people came up talking to me about them, talking about Lauren. They were looking for the manager of the site manager and they're calling her and she pops up. She's in a dumpster cleaning stuff out of the recycling dumpster, leader of the site on her phone, and just happy as a clam. It's our team. We do things. We did a 100% sort for the NFL house this year. It was at Arnaud's restaurant that does nothing but throw it in a dumpster. At 3:00 in the morning, I'm in the dumpster at Arnaud's, taking it out, loading it out, sorting it.
It was three nights. We were doing that from my lab. Again, I've got a great young team, but I was there every night. I was the only one who did it every night. I'm old and I cannot show these kids any weakness, or they'll eat me alive. The Super Bowl was on a Sunday, so Saturday night was the third night at Arnaud's restaurant. It was the third night we were there at 3:00 in the morning, got back to the shop at 8:00, and helped them get started on the store.
I slept two hours back in the Superdome for noon. We pulled all the recycling that night. We didn't pick the bowl, but we pulled all the recycling. We didn't leave the Superdome until midnight, back in the city at 7:00 in the morning. It was just that, and our team does it with a smile. That would just eat so many people alive. Now we're doing that. We laugh about it, and they're just tough. Our team is 50% female for the most part.
There's just no difference in our teams. We work well together, but sleep is sometimes not, but they're proud of it. You've seen it, see the red shirt, we've got different color t-shirts we give people, but you have to be an Osprey employee to wear the red shirt. Those kids respect it. They're pretty proud. They walk tall, and so that's a pretty cool family, and a lot of camaraderie, and how we do that.
Taking The Leap: Opting For Change And Building A Mission-Driven Business
One of the things we talk about on this show is opting into change. Shifting gears a little bit to some of your personal slash professional change, you've mentioned it a couple of times, but you opted into change. You left a stable like career and took a chance on yourself and your innovation and took a chance on embracing the suck. Can you talk a little bit about that process and you what you learned from opting into change?
I think I get more credit than I deserve for that because I don't see it as big. I was working for a great company. They were going through some changes. I've always been a person that felt like whatever job you're doing, you should be treating it like a career. I worked in the oil field. I was aroused about roughneck after college, worked in the chemical plants and oil refineries of Louisiana on turnarounds. I got to go work in the environment of, I'm just going to say, of men. That's a man's work.
I'm in college with these guys, worried about their golf game. I'm out there with these guys, worrying about staying alive. The guy I rode with got killed six months after I left offshore on the rig. I tell everybody, I got my education at Millsaps. I finished my education on Booker 352, 100 miles South of Sabine Pass, Texas out. There was a hardness that came from that. My dad's side of the family is pretty tough, hard folks, commercial fish, and chemical plants.
My mom's side of the family is all ballet, dancing, and teachers, so it was a good mix. I had a lot of confidence that the world we came through of being a college kid and getting this job, and so worried about all that. The experiences I had working in the hard hat world and that real working world gave me confidence that they really couldn't do anything to me in the corporate world, in the college world, because I could go back to the, I go feed my family back in the oil patch.
Parts of me like the oil patch better than I like working in an office setting, but you started realizing that there it's a caught the Wizard of Oz paying attention to the man behind the curtain. The biggest companies in the world, the people, aren't any smarter than anybody else. They're not a cobble of geniuses running all of this stuff. I just always had a little bit of confidence that I could do this. This isn't that hard. I've never been intimidated.
The biggest companies in the world aren't run by any smarter people or a collection of geniuses.
I've always been on that edge in sales and peace. I don't even know I'm a consulting geologist. In my career at Thompson Engineering, they were going to go through some changes, and I didn't want to go through another change. I love the company. I could still be working there, retiring, and just had been smart. I'm a big Dave Ramsey guy, believe in no debt, debt traps you into doing things you shouldn't have to do. I had really been, I'd started Osprey for about two years.
It had been happening for about a year and a half. I'd set some financial goals, not so much that I was trying to leave Thompson, but I was like, if I get to this point, it's only fair to both parties to make a decision, either sell or hire a manager for Osprey and turn it over and let it go due. It wasn't going to be fair to Thompson. At that point, I'm working 60 hours a week for Thompson and legitimately 30 hours a week for Osprey.
My son had come to college here, so he was the first employee cleaning out these pilot litigators that we were getting this work. It just came to that point, and I'd made some. I'll tell you the numbers. In my mind, I said, “Don, if you ever get $100,000 unencumbered in the Osprey account, that's enough to at least begin the decision.” They were getting ready to go through a change. I looked in the checking account.
The CEO wanted to meet just about the change and everything that was going to be going on. Came home that night, and I looked at the checking account. I think it was like $78,000 in the account. I have never taken a penny out of Osprey. That was all just paying for my patents, paying the people, and banking the money to do it. I think I had 27,000 and AR coming in in the next week. There it was. I'm like, “Dang it.”
I was meeting him on Friday morning. That was a Thursday night. I went and talked to my wife, and I said, “I think I'm ready to fly.” She was staying home, Mom. It was not just quitting. I was quitting everything with twins and everything. I've always liked the challenge, and I've always felt pretty confident in myself. She said, “I don't care. She trusts me.” Literally, I went to breakfast the next morning with the CEO and said, “Don, I love Thompson and I'm always going to do what I can do, but I think I'm ready to fly.”
It was such an amicable departure. I gave him a four-month notice. I worked there for another four months. They're my people, and I still love them. I still have friends. What was so crazy, Christine, I told my wife, I was like, I’ll tell him what I'm going to do, all this. I told my wife that my last day was going to be some point in April, whatever it was. I just told my wife, I was like, “My last day is April 18th, whatever.
It will take the weekend, but next Monday I'm going to Texas, and I'm just going to go in stormwater doors and knock on doors for a week. I'll see you on the weekend back there, because then I'm going to Florida. I figured at that point, it was the States with water and money. That's where I was going to go. To this date, I've never made that trip.
We have never had to go knock on doors because people like you have found us, heard our story, and we sink into where we can help with their mission. It's still a stress of business. The way I look at it is it's not about me. It's about these families and these people, especially just these brilliant young folks that work here. What keeps me up at night is generating the revenue to honor the commitment they've made and the trust their families have made into this vision.
I take that very seriously. It's what keeps me up at night. It's not that “I can go sell. I can go talk you into buying a litter.” I can do all of that. I think we have neat ideas, and I think we can help solve people's problems. It's that whatever might happen affects people's livelihoods. That's what keeps me stressed out. I guess on the personal deal, I'm probably too old to go back to the old patch. I might be able to get something I could do. It would hurt a lot of haspen.
I love that you brought up a little bit the nervousness of going to talk to your spouse about this, because I had that, I was like, “What is he going to say? Is he going to be supportive?” It was a no-brainer for him. I would bet on you. I'm so nervous that I held it in for a while.
My poor wife, she knows I do what I want anyhow. She's one of those poor things. Again, I'm a cliché deal, but literally I have lived by that. There are a couple of different things, but it is that a ship is safe in the harbor, but that's not what it was built for. I challenge people, whatever it is, to really challenge and find what you're built for and grab on to that with both hands.
That's literally, my wife has finally quit asking when I'm going to retire because I'm probably going to retire two days after they start digging my hole because I'm loving what I'm doing. It's going to be in a different mode, and I cannot spend 3 and 4 weeks on the road in a month. It gets to be too much. When you're living your passion, I think people see that and then to create a company built around passion and the team around here and how they live it, I think my role will evolve, but it'll never end. I hope.
This is incredible. I have one final question, although we could talk for hours, I'm sure.
We will talk for hours. We'll keep talking.
Circular Economy For All: Realistic Solutions For A Global Issue
Why embrace the change to the circular economy? Why embrace that?
I believe in business, and I believe you give business time. There's an ethics of business that's new. We're not the stereotype of the business of the ‘80s, the Wall Street movies, and all that stuff. I think meeting people like you and John Radke and these folks, that again, you all care. You all are trying. You are all inside a corporate monolith doing your part. I think there's a new team there now doing the same thing.
I think our solution, I believe in a free market with the right direction, I believe business can adapt and build the correct solution that's actually long-term, scalable, and sustainable from a cost standpoint. My challenge to this market, to this country, is to bring a realistic solution to a world that's not rich. We see a lot of solutions that are based on rich folks. A 10% increase in your costs for your groceries in an upper-middle-class family, the lights are going to stay on.
I'm passionate about trying to bring solutions to the folks who aren't as privileged that can still care. Some of the concerns that they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis or a lot bigger than sustainability. It's just more up to it. We keep trying to bring these affluent solutions that are probably the issue. The subdivisions of the Atlanta solution are not going to work for sub-Saharan Africa and Central America. I want to build solutions that can actually go to areas that don't have the revenue to afford these deals. That's where we're going to see our population.
That's also going to see people who have real limits to just their solid waste disposal. We had a work with a lady from Papua New Guinea. Again, frame of reference, you've got to meet people where they are. She was talking about the issues in New Guinea that they still have a certain faction that believes in a little bit of voodoo, a little bit of witchcraft. They all live over the water, over the salt water in these lagoons. If somebody is going to hex you, they have to get something you touched. Guess what? A Coke bottle trash, anything you touch. Guess what the purifier is? Saltwater. You're trashing the ocean, and the witch doctor cannot get you.
There's all this waste because there's a space.
What are you going to do? There's a landfill is a dump up in the mountains that the local warlord runs. You don't even know if it's going to be open or not. You don't have a car, and you don't know if you might. It doesn't fit into the drop-off center open this Saturday?
No.
It's a little different priorities. We have fun, and we've tested it. We've literally brought recycling, whether it's the event recycling, but it just hasn't been successful. If it takes ten steps to be successful, the one little hiccup in those ten steps, and the whole project, they throw it all away. Where our company has come in is what is that little step? We're very passionate about rural recycling. We just did Love the Boot in Louisiana, would keep Louisiana beautiful, Lieutenant Governor Coca-Cola.
It was about, they had a thousand sites this year around the state. We set up a system to pick up the cycling at these different cleanups, even at the rural ones statewide this year. Everybody should be able to do a little recycling. I know you're running on time, but another favorite story is we did a recycling project in Phoenix, Louisiana. They were dealing with saltwater intrusion in the Mississippi River. The river was low.
The Gulf was coming up the river, and some of those cities get their drinking water from the river because of the saltwater. They're having a real hard time. What was the answer is bottled water that everybody wants to get rid of. That's what kept these people in clean drinking water. Niagara sponsored our work down there to accept recycling for all the bottled water that people were using. By the time the project got started, the river came up, and it ended, but then that was a great start, and we were working for Niagara.
We ended up just offering recycling to the school and the neighborhood. This community, literally, Christine, it's about twenty trailers and two houses. This is not Fifth Avenue. We're getting a little recycling, and we're doing whatever. The classes are probably twenty kids all in one school room. We get down there and we just think, we'll send one pickup truck because we just don't think we're going to get much. I want to say the kindergartners had over 2000 cans and bottles by themselves. We had two trips.
We couldn't even close the back doors on the truck. We had recycling everywhere. The school did so great. The kindergartners won the pizza party, and we bought ice cream for the whole school. Again, that was a little community. Miss Daryl called us. When are we coming back? It's time to think about the wrap-up this year. Those are the stories that tell people to quit worrying about all the noise, all the negativity, but it's happening at the right levels. You're going to have setbacks. Don't let that stop you. Set a vision, set your successes, set a big vision, and be happy if you only get halfway there.
You're going to have setbacks. Don't let that stop you. Set a vision, set your successes, and be happy if you only get halfway there.
I love that. Embrace the change of the circular economy because it's something that you can bring to everybody, and people are asking for it. Those stories are examples of people, like income aside, people are asking for this.
This young generation is very cognizant, and they're becoming more cognizant of their footprint. That's what this is all about. Don't preach about, you don't know. My poor wife. She feels so guilty when she gets a straw, because she has sensitive teeth. It's okay, I'll pick up an extra three bottles from water. It's this, we want to give people the option to say, “This is my footprint. I can make the best decisions I can make.” Which is what I think, if you would explain more about the EPR piece, is it really start at the production.
That's where I like these concepts, and all plastics aren't created equal, all metals aren't created equal. If we can get going to where we're not co-mingling polymers and things like that. We're even seeing it now. Last year, with the Titans, we got to see their stadium cups before and sent them to the KW plastics to vet them. These are all good. They want to hologram. That's where the decisions are being made at a smart level. Pick the right products that we can recycle. Give us a shot to do that. We're seeing more and more of that.
Key Takeaways: Respect, Vision, And Embracing The Suck
Thank you. This was riddled with little nuggets that I am super excited for our readers to hear. I'm just going to rehash a few of them. I think you did a great job of reiterating that when you're trying to bring people together to respect their priorities, listened to what those people are trying to accomplish, and rally them around a vision and how critical and supportive that can be in driving a change. You also talked like cannot get over this embrace the suck.
I am going to now use that forever. It's embrace the hard stuff. That's what we're trying to do here is like sift through the discomfort that comes with change. Change is not easy. It takes lifting up your boots and working hard. I always say, “If it were easy, somebody would have done it by now. If recycling could be fixed with like a couple of small things, it would have been done by now, but it cannot be. It takes a lot of work, and it's messy work.
When you embrace that hard stuff, you end up with something really powerful and beautiful as far as your outputs go.” That's a great reminder. Also, for those that are trying to figure out how to build a business, being creative with your funding and trying to think through different ways to solve your problem. Don't always think about the typical sources, but trying to be creative and thinking through how can you engage a corporate partner to support something that is valuable to a municipality. I know you've been able to transition those partnerships over to the municipality as well, so that it becomes a part of the infrastructure.
Add to that, Christine. The traditional models don't exist anymore. This is the best time in the world for the side hustle. Don't go flip your boss off and quit until you got some money in the bank. This is the perfect time to try things that the information the communication, and do a side hustle, and do not let money be the driver of your decision, because it will trap you in your decision.
A very good reminder that we need to start bringing realistic solutions that are not made for the rich. That's a thousand percent what trying to talk about here is like, how do we build an economy that is fueled by circularity and social equity together? That's how I think we're going to be able to sustain long-term. Just a reminder about thinking about how to use your resources smartly, which I thought was another great reminder. Thank you so much for your time and for this discussion. I laughed the hardest in all of my interviews so far.
We go back. It seemed that we go back twenty years. It's just the cool thing about this, Christine, is we're all getting to work with our friends. Just like there's not a lot of bad actors. The problem with this business is that we're more at home with each other before we ever get to business. It's just common because it just seems like a bunch of people that are working together, bringing passion, doing change, but enjoying the relationships as we do it, which is the key part of all of it. Great.
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About Don Bates
Don Bates is the owner/founder of Osprey Initiative, LLC and the inventor of the Litter Gitter. A graduate of Millsaps College, he has over 25 years of experience in the environmental consulting business. Born in Hammond, Louisiana, he grew up in the swamps around Manchac, Louisiana. He has spent most of his life in and around waterways and has a passion for maintaining and improving our natural resources. He feels that the best legacy he can leave to future generations is access to wild places unmarred by human impacts.