I was lucky because my father was a very forward thinking entrepreneur. So in the late 80s, before recycling was a thing, you didn’t have a separate trash bin back then in California anyway.
So we had an office supply business and we had trucks running around to offices all over Orange County. And as we were in there as salespeople, we were in these accounts, we would see these soda cans piling up.
So we made a deal where we would give people a trash can that they could put their aluminum into, and we would take it back with our trucks because our trucks were running back empty right to the warehouse.
We would collect all that up and then we take one huge shipment to the recycling center and get some money for it and we would give people the full retail credit for their aluminum as a credit off on their supplies.
We were just using our distribution system, our assets, in reverse, to serve the community.
