Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Joe Clayton has spent a career blending environmental ideals with business pragmatism, moving from grassroots activism to leadership in IT asset disposition.
He began as a conservation-minded student focused on coal plant pollution in the Ohio River Valley and a proposed dam in the Red River Gorge. Graduate work deepened his focus on policy and economics, including the dynamics often summarized as the tragedy of the commons. “I’ve always been an environmentalist,” he said.
After leaving academia, he turned to recycling as a more direct way to innovate. In West Virginia he and a partner took over municipal recycling and used GIS to map where landfills should not be sited. He later moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, helping launch what he describes as the first composting program in the South and an early electronics recycling effort in 1998.
Clayton then bought into a young e-scrap company and helped grow it from five employees to 180. As commodity values fell with less gold and copper in devices, he pivoted from pure materials recovery to reuse and remarketing. That shift guides his work today as vice president of business development at ARCOA Group.
Music has been a steady thread alongside the industry work. In college he gravitated toward bluegrass and country and spent time around artists like John Prine, Willie Nelson and Leon Russell. He still travels for shows, from Phish to rising players such as mandolinist Wyatt Ellis, and plans sets from Gillian Welch to a new collaboration featuring alumni of Wilco, Hüsker Dü and REM. “My music is eclectic,” he said.
This year’s E-Scrap Conference will see him return to the stage for both the lighthearted legends panel and a discussion on proven technology. So now it is time to step away from the show floor and into the spotlight with Joe Clayton.
What’s your default karaoke song?
I don’t sing — I’m terrible at it and honestly shy about it. My friends joke with me, saying, “Do you know why Bob Marley sang that song?” and then they answer, “So you don’t have to.” That about sums it up. I tried a few times over the years, but after 50 years of people telling me to shut up, I finally listened. Karaoke is not my thing.
What band or song makes you crank up the volume in your car?
There are a lot, but The Clash is always near the top. If it’s any Clash song, I’ll turn it up, but “The Guns of Brixton” especially gets the volume all the way up. That one has stayed with me.
What’s your guilty pleasure TV show?
I’m addicted to NCIS. I don’t know why, but it’s one I can always fall back on. It’s predictable, but it works.
When was the last time you took public transport and where was it to?
I took Amtrak to New York City. It’s about an eight-hour trip and I had a lot of work to do. I could either wait and fly the next day or get on the train, work along the way and arrive a day earlier. I left in the morning and got there in the afternoon and the ride through Pennsylvania was beautiful.
Who would you most hate to be stuck in an elevator with?
Probably Roger Waters, the bassist from Pink Floyd. I think he’s lost his mind, and I’ve always been more of a David Gilmour fan. I never liked The Wall. I did see Pink Floyd live, and Wish You Were Here is one of my favorite albums, but after Animals I thought the music went downhill. That said, I saw a lot of great bands in that era – Led Zeppelin, Emerson, Lake & Palmer with a full orchestra, Elton John and The Who on the night of the Cincinnati tragedy in 1979 [where 11 fans were killed in a crowd crush]. Pink Floyd just never clicked for me in the same way. On the other hand, I always thought David Bowie was brilliant but I was usually four albums behind him. When he was in Berlin making masterpieces, I was just catching up to the records from a few years before. Still, “Heroes” with Robert Fripp’s guitar is one of my favorite songs ever.
What piece of business advice do you think is overrated?
Gross profit. It’s always about net profit. People sometimes chase market share or top-line numbers, but if you’re losing money in the process you aren’t really building value. You have to protect margins so you can grow the business sustainably. Anyone can post big revenue and lose money, the trick is making the bottom line work.
What’s your most irrational superstition or habit?
I’ve always had this fear of drowning, so I never swim in lakes. It makes no sense as I can swim and I’ll happily wade through rivers while fly fishing. But put me near a still, deep lake and I just won’t go in. It’s completely irrational, but it’s stuck with me.
Aliens land and ask you to explain capitalism in one sentence. What do you say?
I’d tell them: You don’t make money on the sell, you make money on the buy. That’s the simplest way to understand it. I actually once asked Hunter Thompson about aliens when I met him, and he said he didn’t think about them. I do think there’s intelligent life out there, but that would be my answer.
If you weren’t in the recycling industry, what different job would you secretly love to do?
I’d probably be a band tour manager. Music has been a huge part of my life, and being on the road with musicians would have been a great adventure.
Who was your childhood hero?
Goldie Hawn. I just adored her. My first girlfriend, so to speak, was Goldie Hawn and then my second was Emmylou Harris. Those were the women I idolized growing up.
What ringtone is on your phone right now?
The default one. I’ve never bothered to change it.
What’s the most recent book you gave up on and why?
I gave up on Apocalypse Never [Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger, 2020]. The premise was interesting at first, but it cherry-picked examples to argue that environmental warnings are always overblown. They left out crucial cases like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the very real impacts of DDT. It felt selective rather than balanced, so I put it down.
When was the last time you did something for the very first time?
A couple of years ago I went to see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas. I hadn’t been inside the Sphere before, so that was a first. I went back later to see Phish there, and that show was much better. With U2, Bono tried to play “Rock the Casbah” without knowing the words. They did six cover songs and skipped many of their classics. They didn’t even play “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” The Edge is a great guitarist, but because he had to cover all the rhythm parts himself I think it limited what he could have done. Phish used the space much more creatively.
What’s pinned to your fridge door?
Nothing, it’s stainless steel, so nothing sticks.
What’s the strangest thing on your desk right now?
An index nut size letter opener. It looks like a tool but it’s really just a letter opener, so it’s a bit odd to keep around.
