Big Recycling, Big Business

The “Company Profile” is an Earth911.com series highlighting consumer goods and services making a difference through product stewardship and recycling. Products and services featured do not pay for placement and are not endorsed by Earth911.com.

Recycling at home, for over 50 percent of America, is usually a no-brainer. Your stuff goes in your curbside bin, you put out your bin, your stuff gets picked up. Pretty easy.

But for others, like businesses, sometimes it’s not so simple. Take hospitals, for example. The waste that they create is completely varied, from plastics and medical sharps to cloth and cardboard, and also on a larger scale than a typical home. Not all recycling vendors accept these materials, so businesses end up hiring many vendors, which can be time consuming and cumbersome.

That’s where Michael Mills, co-founder of MCC Recycling, found his niche. Earth911 talked to him to learn more about his secrets for success and his love for trash.

Taking Off

When Mills was a senior in college (he’s 27 now), he was trying to decide what to do after graduation. “I realized that recycling and waste has always carried a negative connotation to it,” said Mills. Using his affinity for technology and his understanding of the “younger crowd,” he tried to bring a “new twist” to the industry, using print media, his website and blog to share more about recycling and MCC.

A Nice Niche

“We provide recycling services for commercial accounts,” said Mills. MCC does not service residential or curbside services, but instead is “known for single-source recycling solutions.” They go to warehouses, office towers and hospitals, where there is a wide variety of recyclable waste.

Beyond paper and plastic, MCC handles “the other 30 to 35 things” that could be recycled in a typical office’s trash. According to Mills, having multiple vendors to provide this recycling can become tedious. “We come in and provide one contact, one source and we will design a comprehensive, single-source system to take one to 30 completely separate recyclable materials.” MCC recycles everything from stretch-wrap and corrugated cardboard to Styrofoam peanuts and wood pallets.

The Principal’s Principles

The company is large enough to be competitive, but small enough to have a personal touch, according to Mills. “I am the co-founder, and I will give you my cell number. If it’s a Saturday afternoon and something goes wrong, call me and I’ll take care of it.” Mills also added that they, “can’t ever get too big for our britches.”

Mills is going for a triple-win with his company: “customers win, company grows and we’re doing the right thing by the planet.” Done, done and done.

“It’s very rewarding, because when we succeed, everybody benefits. There’s no smoke or mirrors in this business.”

On the Horizon

MCC Recycling is starting a new program, called the “MCC 95% Recycling Challenge,” where the company is looking to partner with businesses shooting to reach a 95 percent recycling rate. “You hear a lot of buzz about zero-waste,” said Millls. “But the one thing that you need is not fancy trucks and smart engineers, it’s education. The technology exists to recycle everything these days, you just have to get people on board to participate.”

MCC is also hoping to start going out to schools to educate kids about the benefits of being eco-friendly and recycling. Schoolchildren are the easiest to talk to.

Favorite R

For Mills, his favorite “R” is “Recycling, because recycling can be very very easy, if customers are educated properly. And if it’s easy, the participation rate is high.”

Mills loves meeting new challenges, “Every new customer that calls is a new frontier.” He often quotes his favorite speaker, Zig Ziglar, when referring to how to solve a new problem facing his team: “A customer doesn’t really want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. They are looking for solutions.”