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Today our guest is Adam Baruchowicz and his bio is. Adam is the Chief Recycling Officer at Return to Vendor. A pioneer in textile recycling, he began collecting and recycling clothing as a personal project and now has recycled, get this, over £20 million of clothing and textiles. He began his career as a day trader building and managing a team of 15 people. In 2001, he co founded HEB magazine, one of the highest circulated Jewish culture magazines in the world. Adam has 15 years of experience creating collection hubs for municipalities, apartment buildings, organizations, and fashion brands. And Adam is going to lead us in the topic of making circularity possible today. Adam, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thanks for having me.

Really good to have you here and this conversation about circularity. I'm really curious if somebody has been in the space to get your sense of what's happening in it. Before we do that, give us a little bit of sense of just your origin story as a recycling passionate human. £20 million. That's my brain. Like, first of all, if we were.

Gonna get 35 million pounds, but oh, my gosh, it's an old bio. Sorry, I got. Okay.

I mean, like, I don't update it that much.

It's not.

We're not a public company, right?

Keep on talking about it, like, £35 million.

Like, like, is that a warehouse? Like, how, like, what would it take to contain £35 million? That's a lot.

I think the best way to think about it is, you know, let's see.

A truck is about £40,000. Oh, my gosh, there's 50 weeks in a year, and so that's about a truckload a week.

Let's just say, okay, 18 for like 20.

I've been in business since 2004, so let's just say, you know, yeah, that's.

A lot of 18 weeks better than.

Others, you know, but more or less.

Something like that, let's just say a.

Lot of 18 wheelers for a lot of years to get to 35 million. So, like, how did this passion come about? You're recycling at a scale that's really uncommon. And we're going to talk about where you're going with that, but, like, just the origins of it. Why did you land on recycling is something that you personally wanted to put so much time and energy into.

Yeah, I mean I can't speak for.

Other people's paths, but this one is really just a bunch of random events leading to this. So I can't say like while I'm.

A conscious person, a conscious consumer, my whole life really like I would say a minimalist. So maybe that's where the alignment comes.

Between me and like my, my, my, my current path. But really back in the day I was a day trader, if you can believe. I was a, an early day trader and one of my best friends was a partner in our day training firm. So anyone who was basically pretty decent at day trading would basically train other people how to day trades because you only have one set of eyes and hands. This was in the early 2000s and that day trading life availed me travel. So I had gone to Chile on a random trip that was meant to be going to Ecuador, but a volcano erupted in Ecuador and said you can't go there, but you could go anywhere else. And me and my friend have a badge back. We're like, let's go to Chile.

So I met what was to be.

My future partner in his basically secondhand.

Store in central Santiago.

And he said, well not only like these are the things you should do in Santiago, but not only that, I.

Actually live in New York so maybe we should hang when we get back, when I get back to New York.

And so I knew about him. He told me about the opportunities of.

Used clothing collection those days.

But I was a successful day trader.

And pretty happy on those paths. Well, my best friend was one evening hit by a car and paralyzed. And so I got very involved in, in spinal cord research. I did a lot of events with spinal cord injury research charities and I became in love with one of these charities called the Miami Project to cure Paralysis. And we go to these, they have these really incredible annual events at the Waldorf Historia where it's like the great sports legends dinners. And like they would get. Because the founder of that of organization, Nick Bonacante's son was paralyzed and so he was like in, involved in NBC Sports. So he had like a lot of ties to like really good sports stuff.

And like, I mean I believe like Michael Jordan was there one night, you know and Kelly Slaters there was like.