An Interview with a Next Generation Thinker and Maker, Ross Comcowich

Alex Eaves
Aug 12
11 min read

Learning A Careful Life of Consumption, Just In Case

A woman with green hair holds a bandana that says Love All Animals.The image says Alicia Perkins Small Business Owner Reusers Escape The Waste.

This past April, I was at the College of the Holy Cross for an event with The REUSE! Box Truck. A lot of students and staff passed through that day and I had some great conversations. But one of those conversations stuck out and I knew the story that student told me was something I had to share. Well, without further delay, I'll let Ross take over.

1. When I visited Holy Cross, you told me an amazing story about converting a bus into a tiny house. Could you share that story?

My dad and I renovated an inherited 1959 35’ retired transit bus into an RV! When my Grandpa was studying at the University of Denver, he drove commercial busses in the 1960’s for a company called Trailways. When he retired, he and his diesel mechanic friend bought the same model bus broken down in a field in Florida. They fixed it up and would drive it to Truck shows around the country. It is a 1959 GM PD 4104 Bus; the same model the Freedom Riders burned down in civil rights protests. And it came from the same General Motors plant that produced bombers during WWII in Detroit, Michigan.

In 2020, my grandpa passed. My dad and I had never driven in the bus or anything and it kind of just fell into our hands. We went through the thing as a team and learned to drive it and maintain the ancient 35’ aluminum vehicle.

Shortly after, we renovated the interior to make it a usable camper/RV that we could take to campgrounds. It was previously renovated to an RV sometime in the 80’s, but the interior was in terrible shape. We used as much as possible from the old RV conversion and spiced up the interior into a pretty cool setup. We put up new walls, reused old ceiling tiles, reused and painted some cabinets, modified the original kitchen tile/drawers/etc so that it would work with a our desired new setup, etc etc.

It took us about 2 months working on it everyday for a summer to finish the interior. The bus however is a constant project and it’s always in need of some sort of repair. The thing rocks!

A vintage 1959 Greyhound Bus converted into a tiny house on wheels. — The bus!

(Be sure to check out the video of the bus at the end.)

2. What benefits have you experienced from the bus conversion?

I learned so much about construction, fabrication, and I learned that you can do cool things by building on top or modifying someone or something’s existing setup. It would have been way less effort to just buy a new modern fiberglass camper and have the thing ready to go. This Bus, despite its ancient age, is something that will hopefully last just as long as the fiberglass camper rolling off the factory floor. Newer isn’t always better. That fiberglass camper made in 2025 will likely fall apart and the frame will rot far before the aluminum bus retires from the road. Old used stuff is good too!!!

3. Has the experience with the bus made you look at traditional housing (and structures in general) differently?

Totally. There’s this theory in environmental sociology called Onerous consumption. It’s typically used when analyzing how homesteaders or people who live off the grid interact with their environment. The idea is that they practice a careful life of consumption and are constantly evaluating how much water/electricity/gas, etc they are consuming because they do not have an unlimited supply via a nearby electrical plant. When we go camping in the bus, these same principles apply. You have to carefully calculate how long you can run appliances for to not drain the batteries and have to track how much water you are consuming to ensure enough for critical water enabled tasks. This has made me realize how incredibly wasteful my life is when I’m not camping and not limited by my batteries or water tank levels.

A man with headphones on uses a power screwdriver on a wall and a man inspects the window of a Greyhound bus. — Ross and his dad during the bus build.

4. So, while I'm certainly a solutions guy, we do have to address the problems. Where do you see the most waste in your daily life?

Certainly in my consumption of water and electricity. When I’m at home, I can take a long comforting shower and run the washer and dryer without thinking twice. Sure, there is a bill that arrives at our doorstep every month, but I am not actively thinking about this when I turn the shower knob or activate my dryer.

5. In your personal experience, how do you think recycling has worked and NOT worked as a solution to waste?

We’ve all been socialized in “reduce, reuse, recycle” since we were kids. You know, the idea that separating plastic from the trash bin is doing our part to go green. I think on an individual level, recycling actually has a net negative effect on how most people engage with their personal mission of ‘going green.’ I think separating trash from recycling and religiously taking the recycling out to the street every Monday lulls a lot of people into complacency. It feels like you’re doing something, but if you actually step back and analyze the systems that caused the waste, these systems are often broken and yet universally accepted.

Let me be clear, I do recycle. But I understand that often times recycling won't actually achieve very much and it actually distracts me from the actual environmental problems. I like to think of it this way: instead of picking up all the trash on the beach once it washes up on shore (recycling), why don’t we trace the trash back to its original source (i.e., systems/companies that actually create the waste)?

In my opinion, we are too focused on the products of wastefulness and not the systems that produce them. The idea of recycling and the push to encourage people to recycle focuses their efforts on a better way to deal with the products of waste. This lulls people away from those systemic calculations. In short, I think recycling, while well intentioned, often serves as a feel good distraction that masks deeper systemic issues driving environmental harm. By emphasizing individual action like sorting waste, we avoid confronting the industries and systems that generate excessive waste in the first place.

True sustainability requires shifting focus from managing waste to preventing its creation. Environmental buzz words like recycling also enables huge corporate companies or other environmentally predatory systems (that are the biggest polluters) to ‘pat themselves on the back’ to their environmentally conscious consumers with buzz word initiatives. The environmentally conscious individual sees a recycling campaign as a "Hell yeah." So, when a large corporation boasts about recycling in the sustainability section of its website, despite its business model relying on environmental damage elsewhere, people look the other way and are satisfied with the corporate recycling initiative.

I’m guilty of this. Who cares where a product comes from or where it goes when it’s discarded if it says "made from recycled materials" on it or the company website’s sustainability initiatives brag about rad buzz words like ‘composting’ and ‘recycling’ initiatives. Hey, as long as we place it in the blue bin when we’re finished with it who cares right?

The consumer washes their hands of this problem. This is a resignation of conscience. Henry David Thoreau famously said a similar thing about voting and slavery in the 1800s:

“I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, not wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.” - Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience

Talking about slavery and abolition, he’s saying that when people voted against slavery, but the majority of America elects representatives who still support slavery, progressive abolitionists had the following conclusion: ”Shoot! I voted against slavery but it didn’t sweep the majority. That’s all I can do. I will do absolutely nothing about this until the next election. Then a few years later, I’ll spend 5 minutes voting and hope my party wins. This cycle will repeat. And I’ll actively do nothing to act on my opinion but vote for a party that keeps losing. Better luck next time. Hope my neighbors in the south magically change their views and come to the same conclusion,” as slavery persists.

The argument I’m making is that institutions like voting and buzz words like recycling lull us into complacency in unjust environmental systems similar to this. Let me be clear, buzz words like recycling and composting are cool things that can have real effects. The idea is that we can’t let these buzz words distract us as a cover up from the truth behind some predatory environmental systems.

Recycling is often praised as a simple solution to environmental problems. We have this environmentally conscious energy and that is why so many people go out of the way to recycle. Imagine if we channeled that energy beyond the buzz words into the systemic cause or problems?

The focus on personal habits, like tossing a bottle in the right bin, shifts attention away from the corporations and systems that profit from overproduction and disposability. If we’re serious about sustainability, the goal shouldn’t be cleaning up the mess. The goal should be not making it in the first place.

HOW IT’S WORKED:

I think recycling has worked amazingly for things like metal and industrial materials. For example, an important part broke on the rear axle of the bus. It weighed probably two thousand pounds or so; all super legit cast iron. The internal gears of the piece were seized, not to be used to propel a Bus again. But when it arrived at the scrap yard, those two thousand pounds of cast iron were undoubtedly and efficiently put to work in another product. This is a no brainer and should be expanded. Save your broken products of life from the dump and let’s create systems within our waste system to harvest reusable materials.

A large iron bus axle inside a trailer. — The giant piece of the bus axle that was properly recycled at a scrap yard.

Composting is also a cool form of recycling I’ve seen put to good use. It’s becoming more popular and it’s such a good way to use food scraps. All the thermal energetic potential in the food scraps we eat can so easily be fused into food fuel. It is still rare these days. There’s a private company in my town that does composting but it is not a town run program on a large scale. Let’s get a third bin out on our streets full of compost and reduce the need to produce food system fuel in its place.

6. How do you think the U.S. could step up the solutions to our waste problem? Have you seen or heard of anything anywhere else?

I think just education. We’re all sheltered from the huge waste problem the U.S. has. I think there’s a statistic that if everyone lived like U.S. citizen’s we would need like 7 earths. That is crazy. The lifestyle we live is unsustainable but we are never really confronted with that. We are sheltered from this reality. If we all were a tad bit more educated about the gross overconsumption we engage with, I think the U.S. could actively work towards mitigating this problem. After all, it takes people who care to foster any change. And, if more people care, that is certainly a positive in reducing our waste.

7. It's funny. I always tell people that reusing is nothing new. It’s been going on long before we were here. Do you have any memories of your parents or grandparents reusing in unique ways?

I mean ALL the time. My family members are pros of the reuse movement. My grandpa would always save plastic planters from flowers and most of my family are infected with the ‘just incase’. Nothing too unique comes to mind but I’ve certainly been socialized in this mindset by those before me.

A man with his arm in a sling stands next to a vintage blue Kenworth truck. — Ross' grandfather with his vintage 1961 truck that he would bring to truck shows.

Reusing to me is a double edged sword. I hold on to things that might have a use in the future; the random TV mount that I’ll probably never use, swaths of scrap wood, tripods with broken legs, old phone cases, etc etc. These things often come in super handy. When my wiring goes out on my bus, thank god I held onto that random float switch in the back corner of my garage that will solve the problem without having to buy a new one and it never was sent to the landfill; that is awesome. But, a lot of the things I hold onto never get that call up to the big leagues to be used perfectly in a problem solving manner. Often they just sit, which is okay. They are the ‘just incase’ after all. But, it does contribute to a lot of unnecessary clutter. Whenever I have moved my stuff to college or other places, there is so much of this ‘just incase’ stuff I’ve held onto that is sometimes a burden. That being said, I totally support to holding onto all the ‘just incase’ stuff – just be prepared for a little extra effort when it comes time to deal with it.

8. Do you have any notable stories about saving money on something because you bought it used instead of new?

My dearest companion, my Sony A6300 mirrorless camera is a used warrior. I saved for about a year delivering pizza in my high school days to purchase my first big boy camera. I couldn’t even come close to affording it new so I fired up eBay and went searching for a deal. This thing has been the most reliable work horse ever. I saved $500/600+ just because someone before me took a few pictures with it. It’s been with me for almost a decade now and it’s chugging along like it just came off the factory floor. Used isn’t always worse as most people seem to think; point in case is my old Sony camera.

A man with a camera taking photos of plants. — Ross with his Sony A6300 camera during a Holy Cross shoot on how climate change is affecting alcoholic cider producers in New England.

Also, my dad held onto lots of foam insulation board...a total ‘just incase.’ Well, long story short, we built an 18’ wooden motorboat during Covid and guess what we used for floatation foam?? We went rummaging through that saved foam board from the ‘just incase’ stash. It worked perfect and saved us a ton of money.

A wooden motorboat being built and the boat sitting in water. — The wooden motorboat that Ross and his dad built. Stay tuned for his next project with this!

9. Have you ever taken anything out of the recycling bin or trash to reuse somehow or maybe found something on the side of the road?

Yup. All the time. I live pretty close to where I went to college. Taking advantage of this geographical advantage and the gross over consumption habits of college students, after move-out each May, I would walk the halls to ‘poach’ any cool stuff that people couldn’t fit in their cars or simply left behind. Some notable acquisitions are a flatscreen TV, Rubbermaid folding table, some sweet speakers, a desk, etc etc. It’s incredible what people brush off to the landfill. The computer monitor I’m typing this on right now was a free special off the side of the road in a nearby neighborhood – still chugging strong!!!

10. And lastly, what’s the best thing that you ever got used and why? Got a photo?

This army surplus tool kit. You’re looking at a serious tool kit here bought in surplus after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you were to buy similar tools new this would cost an arm and a leg. My uncle gifted this to me for Christmas one year and I seriously use it almost every day when I’m home. Someone wrenching on stuff as often as me would be tempted to go down to Lowes and buy some shiny new stainless steel tools. This stuff however, despite its age, works like an absolute dream and is seriously the best gift I’ve ever gotten. The U.S. army’s surplus trash is another man’s treasure...USED FOR THE WIN.