If you’ve ever changed the oil in your car, you know what a mess the old used filter is. Some of the dirty oil stays inside it no matter how hard you try to drain it, and it can’t be recycled – all the steel trapped inside is contaminated and therefore unusable. There really isn’t anything useful to do with a used oil filter, so we have no choice but to haul them off to landfills – and we do this in mass quantities. Over 500 million oil filters are manufactured in the U.S. each year, comprised of 150,000 tons of steel and 18 million gallons of oil. That’s a lot of resources to throw away, but we really don’t have a choice – except that now, thanks to Jerry McRae, we do.
Round about 1993, Jerry McRae took his grandson on a business trip to a processing plant where used motor oil was being recycled. As the younger McRae looked out over the sea of used oil filters piled up around the plant, he innocently asked his grandfather what would happen after the oil was drained out. Jerry explained that they would go to the landfill, and his grandson was shocked and dismayed. “Why don’t they just sell that steel to a scrap dealer?” he asked.
“I said, well, it’s kind of complicated,” Jerry told me in a phone interview, “and I went into detail on telling him why it couldn’t be done. But the more I talked, the more I convinced myself that, well, it could be done. So I said to myself, Jerry, you’re a furnace builder, you know how to do this. And so I started on a design.” Jerry had an idea, but it would take two pivotal client relationships and an air sickness bag to turn it into a prototype worthy of a federal patent application.
Jerry’s career had already spanned four decades in the combustion industry, starting in 1957 with his first job at a refractory. “If you look [refractory] up in the dictionary, it means stubborn. These are products that are stubborn to burn, they do not burn up, so they’re used to line furnaces. I was totally taken in by that. The guy that hired me said, “Jerry if you get involved in this company, you will never leave it for the rest of your life. Well, I’ve never left the industry, and I’ve always been fascinated with furnaces and fire.” Jerry worked for that company for twelve years, then started his own business as a manufacturer and distributor of, among other things, furnaces for the disposal of medical waste.
In 1982, during the “Oil Patch Crash” that devastated Texas’ industrial economy, ten of Jerry’s clients with contracts totaling nearly ten million dollars declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Jerry closed up shop. He started a new company repairing furnace systems, then founded his current business, McRae Combustion, in 1990. It was this company, which sought to manufacture thermal equipment that would clean up the environment, like Jerry’s patented medical waste incinerator, which would burn medical waste (known as "Red Bag Waste") and used the clean heat generated by the incinerator to fire a boiler for Hospital Steam Sterilization. Jerry also designed and built custom afterburner systems that burned off toxic fumes coming out of industrial equipment, reducing it to inert gases.
It was through this line of work that Jerry happened to take his grandson to the job site where the mountains of used oil filters inspired the simple question that changed the world. “I was going out into one of my clients businesses to basically to help them figure out how to heat the waste oil that they had,” Jerry said. “They were an oil collector, we never even discussed filters with them.” But he didn’t need to. A year or so after that visit, Jerry got a call from a man named Jim Nickerson of Nickco recycling. Nickco had had a contract to process used tank tract (the tread on tank “tires”) and recover the rubber and aluminum. That contract had ended, and Jim wanted Jerry to help him convert that furnace into a machine that would – of all things – recover the steel from used oil filters. “I said, ‘This isn’t going to be a great job, because it wasn’t built to do this,’” Jerry recalled, “but we did it! In fact, it’s still in operation. But I was never pleased with that design, because I felt like it wasn’t as good as it could be.”
Jerry then went to see another client who wanted to do the same thing. He was trying to use an industrial oven to process the oil filters, but the temperatures required were so high that the oven was melting and it just wasn’t working. But Jerry knew he could make it work, so on his flight home, he took the nearest scrap of paper he could find and started to sketch out a plan. “I took a barf bag, of all things…Just as a side note, barf bags used to all be white. Now they come in every color of the rainbow, and they don’t make very good scratch paper. But back then, they were all white. So I took this barf bag and I sketched up a design that is very similar to what, ultimately, I got a patent on. I still have that barf bag, and it’s framed and hanging on my wall.” His patent for the idea was awarded in 2001.
Jerry McRae started out as a man with a lot of knowledge and expertise in his field – combustion and waste processing – and suddenly, thanks to a simple question from his grandson, became a man with an idea. But his transformation from a businessman to an inventor wasn’t complete until that second “aha” moment – when he realized that there was a real market for his products. Nobody else had ever made furnaces like these before.
“The system is totally green,” he said proudly. “I’m a Christian man, and I believe that everything is God-given to us, and if we waste it, we’re wasting something that God has given to us…[my system] takes used oil filters, which are one of the nastiest products on the Earth, and it turns it into something useful. It saves the steel, it saves half of the oil that was in that block, and it cleans up all of the energy that is contained in the oil.”
“You can actually generate electricity from the by-product coming off of my product,” Jerry noted. “But that’s not what we normally use the heat for, we normally use the heat to process the oil that’s being collected by the plant. In other words, we use that heated oil to clean up the rest of the oil so that they can then sell it. But here’s the key to it, my system runs off the oil that’s reclaimed.” And in addition to being good for the environment, it’s good for the pocketbook, too – Jerry’s clients make very good money selling what was once useless, hazardous waste to scrap dealers and oil processing plants to be recycled into industrial and consumer products.
Jerry advises young people seeking jobs to find a career they really, truly love, “Because you’re at your work more than you’re at home. And sometimes it takes changing jobs several times before you find that job that you like. The key to success isn’t being some genius or mastermind or inventor, but it’s being persistent. In other words, stick with it! It might take you a year or two, or more than that – in my case it’s taken a whole lifetime.”
Additionally, aspiring entrepreneurs have an additional row to hoe – getting the experience they need to succeed before attempting to strike out on their own. “If you want to start your own business, find out what you want to do and then go work for someone else. Get your business legs under you. Most people think that just because a guy starts his own company he’s going to be driving a Mercedes and flying a personal jet in a few weeks. Most of us guys are just human beings who have good ideas, and most of us have some background doing something else first. I love designing furnaces, I love solving problems, and I changed direction a few years back. After I decided I would never work building furnaces in the oil patch again, I decided I wanted to help clean up the environment, and our equipment does.”
To learn more about Jerry McRae’s systems and the impact of used oil filters on our landfills, visit http://www.mcraecombustion.com.
1 comment:
I love this. Thanks Jamie!
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