Header Image: Jason Wheeler (left) with students and lecturer BJ Klingenberg on Cal Poly's campus.

Jason Wheeler (Business Administration, ’00) has been fascinated for years with the idea of repurposing materials to help reduce their carbon footprint.

“I’ve always been mindful about the recovery of materials,” he said. “When I look at anything, I see the carbon it took to deliver that product to its current place — from extracting, processing and transporting those materials.”

Today, Wheeler is the founder of JackRabbit Salvage Marketplace, an online startup launched through the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship that connects people donating salvageable construction materials with others looking to recover and repurpose them.

JackRabbit recently helped a local contractor repurpose flooring from Kennedy Library during its renovation. With a focus on recovery and reuse rather than recycling, Wheeler hopes his venture helps highlight the difference between the two.

“When materials are recycled, you still have the high-carbon processing of those materials, and then you have carbon generated by transporting and selling them as new products,” he said. “JackRabbit’s mission is to make recovery of materials easier, and to advocate for those willing to engage in recovery versus recycling. We’re a virtual marketplace for construction, demolition waste or things that can be repurposed.”

Wheeler drew inspiration from Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, where contractors can donate surplus building materials such as doors, windows and paint, which are then sold to the public at a fraction of retail cost, with profits supporting the organization.

“The warehousing of material is a limiting factor, so they have to turn a lot of stuff away,” he said. “We bypass warehousing and transit and have a buyer set up before the material is generated.”

The idea for JackRabbit first came about during the pandemic, when Wheeler started a home renovation project and saw thousands of dollars’ worth of material going to waste that could have been recovered.

He applied to the Small Business Development Center at the CIE and was paired with a team of Cal Poly software engineering students who took on his idea as part of their capstone project. He also competed in a funding opportunity called AngelCon, which granted him acceptance into the CIE incubator program.

Serendipitously, during his first meeting with the student team at Kennedy Library, they learned about the library’s upcoming renovation.

“I said, ‘Guys, what if we could get this implemented for the library restoration project?’” he recalled. “They got really excited about it, knuckled down and were able to put a little something together in time.”

For the next phase of JackRabbit, Wheeler wants to incorporate a giving component into the business model, similar to how ReStore profits go back to Habitat for Humanity.

“We will allow users to designate a charitable beneficiary, so that when they post material, that material is then monetized with a portion of the sale going to their chosen beneficiary,” he said.

A San Diego native, Wheeler attended Cal Poly on a wrestling scholarship and decided to stay in the area after graduation. He now coaches wrestling at San Luis Obispo High School.

“My experience at Cal Poly was awesome, and I absolutely fell in love with the area,” he said. “My high school coach wrestled for Cal Poly, and his coach wrestled for Cal Poly back in the 1970s. I still coach wrestling, and I keep waiting for one of my wrestlers to go wrestle for Cal Poly.”

After graduation, Wheeler worked in local real estate and construction before shifting gears to be a full-time dad for several years. His involvement with the SBDC included career training geared toward helping people like him reenter the workforce.

With JackRabbit up and running, Wheeler is optimistic about the future.

“Our overarching mission is to change people’s mindset about crushing up materials that get shipped off and recycled or landfilled,” he said. “We want to make it make business sense to recover more materials — to mainstream the recovery of materials.”