Growing a waste and recycling business steadily for the last 10 years, Eagle Waste & Recycling has focused on its opportunities by improving efficiency, enhancing recycling and making every area they serve a long-term partner in their business.
Eagle Waste & Recycling, Inc. was founded on July 1, 2005 after owner Alan Albee purchased two rear load commercial and residential routes from Vaira Ozols in Eagle River, WI. The routes covered the area equivalent to three or four townships that consisted of approximately 8,000 people. Eagle Waste & Recycling started with a total of seven employees including Alan Albee and his wife Marti and entailed a lot of long hours and hard work. Albee previously worked at Superior Services, Inc. for more than 12 years, which was purchased by Vivendi in the late 1990s and has more recently been purchased by Advanced Disposal. Albee wore many hats in his tenure at Superior, including Environmental Engineer, General Manager of Emerald Park, Cranberry Creek and Seven Mile Creek Landfills, and stints as a Midwest Region Landfill Manager and Central/Northeast Wisconsin Area Manager over two landfills and nine hauling locations. Albee decided to part ways with Vivendi after getting married and having children. “I wanted to control my own destiny. I wanted to be sure that my kids could go to the same school and make lifelong friends without being uprooted due to the necessity that my family move for my job. I too often saw managers becoming uprooted as a result of personality conflicts or job responsibility changes and did not want to take this chance for me and my family.”
Currently servicing northern Wisconsin and the Upper Penninsula of Michigan from Iron River, WI/Ashland on the west to Merrill, WI on the south, to Laona on the east to Watersmeet, MI on the north, Eagle Waste & Recycling now operates three commercial/residential front loader trucks and one roll-off out of the Ashland location and five front loaders, one side loader, two semi-tractor trailers and four roll-off trucks out of Eagle River. In addition, Eagle Waste operates a transfer station and MRF in Eagle River and a transfer station in Ashland.
A Growing Success
Rapid growth occurred immediately within the first year of being in business. “We doubled our revenue during our first full year and nearly doubled again in year two,” says Albee. However, in 2008 the substantial growth stalled when the economy started suffering. “I put on the brakes on our growth, and decided to focus on paying down debt rather than growing at such a high rate. We still managed to grow 20 percent per year, but it was only adding density in existing service areas. By being the little guy on the block, family owned and operated with a focus on fair pricing and superior customer service, it made growing easy.”
In addition, due to reduced construction activities, temporary services growth was flat for nearly five years, finally starting to come back in 2013. “We feel that Eagle Waste & Recycling has always been ahead of the curve by design. With several of the companies we compete against electing to reduce services offered due to budget concerns while continuing to raise pricing, we continue to offer the value and service the customers are wanting and needing and always charge a fair price that is justifiable for that service,” says Albee. “We are not hesitant to ‘think out of the box’ to come up with unique solutions that maximize efficiencies—such as using new and/or additional equipment while decreasing labor and time to service—to the ordinary and unique opportunities that are uncovered. That way of thinking has opened up many doors with ideas on ways to also make our customers more efficient. We look at each customer as a long-term partner and never take any of them for granted.”
Fast-forward to 2013 with all of the debt paid off and the economy showing signs of improvement, Eagle Waste & Recycling once again decided to grow. In 2013, a single-stream MRF and solid waste transfer station was constructed in Eagle River, WI and another transfer station was constructed 110 miles to the northwest in Ashland, WI. The Ashland operation was developed to expand the service area and to also provide feedstock for the new MRF. “We needed to control the destiny of our MRF. My long-term goal is to have our own trucks supply the necessary volume of SSR to operate our MRF at a break-even or better level. While we currently depend on outside sources to provide us opportunities which we should continue to receive and will appreciate, we want to build our own customer base up large enough that allow us to be self-sustaining with our own,” indicates Albee.
With increasing volumes of recyclables as the goal, Eagle Waste & Recycling’s growth in this very seasonal rural area of northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has begun to focus on providing recycling services to customers not receiving it and adding new commercial and municipal customers. Between January 1, 2013 and March 2015, Eagle Waste added new municipal customers consisting of the Cities of Ashland and Crandon, WI, the Cities of Bessemer and Ironwood, MI, and the Town of Laona, WI. In all of the cases, carted automated collection was established for the first time. In all but one of these locations, automated SSR was added using a 96-gallon container. “Automated collection of SSR in Bessemer, MI is the first of its kind in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan as far as I am aware,” says Jim Whittinghill, Sales Manager for Eagle Waste. “We were very excited to add this opportunity in an area where recycling rates were historically low.”
Today, Eagle Waste & Recycling has once again pulled in the reigns of growth somewhat. “I am fairly conservative,” indicates Albee. “I want to focus again on dropping our debt somewhat as I am concerned with increasing interest rates in the future. This means that we will drop back to 20 percent annual revenue growth for a while.”
Out and About
Eagle Waste & Recycling concentrates not only on the growth side of the business, but also makes sure that they are participating in many charitable organizations within the communities they service, such as the schools, sports related functions, churches, the Lions Club, etc. They donate to numerous local organizations and events with a strong focus on local youth. “Whether we are donating collection services at the football, baseball or soccer fields, the annual fun run, the Lions Club food tent or making monetary donations for ‘Coats for Kids’, youth hunting organizations, the Childrens Museum, the Discovery Center, the high school yearbook, band, graduation party and math club, we try to assist were we can,” indicates Albee. “I have always been proud that we have the opportunity to give back to the communities where we live and work that also support our business.”
“We also created and support a Recycling Rewards Program in Tomahawk, WI that has been tremendous success,” says Whittinghill. The Recycling Rewards Program was designed where a specific city employee selects a home each week for a random recycling inspection. He then makes an official stop at that selected home on their service day prior to the trash and recycling being collected. He will then do a ‘general’ inspection of the contents of both the trash and recycling carts. If he finds no recycling mixed in with the trash and no trash mixed in with the recycling, that resident wins that week’s jackpot. Eagle Waste donates $20 per week in ‘Chamber Bucks’ to the contest. The reward is progressive, meaning that if there is no winner in a specific week, the jackpot increases by $20 in Chamber Bucks the following week. In addition to the gift certificate, which can be used at any Tomahawk Chamber of Commerce member businesses, the winners have their photo taken which is placed in the local newspaper. “We feel this program supports and promotes recycling to a much greater degree and not only rewards people for simply doing the right thing, but also supports local business through the use of Chamber Bucks,” continues Whittinghill.
In addition, within the company, staff maintains training by using videos for monthly safety meetings and weekly office and administration meetings where they discuss and train on different aspects regarding the ongoing customer service improvements that can be implemented. “We implement service that matches the customer needs while maximizing efficiency by offering EOW (every two week) and OAM (once every four weeks,” says Albee. “We try and setup the correct service initially, but if an existing customers needs change, our drivers will bring that to managements attention for improvements.”
Safety training is done by Safety Manager, Chad Metzger, Administration meetings are conducted by Office Manager, Dawn Griffin and sales training is completed by Whittinghill. “We have developed a great labor force of nearly 50 employees and need to continually keep them safe. Our annual bonuses are tied to company profitability and safety,” says Albee. “Every employee is eligible for an annual bonus. Individual bonuses are based on safety record, attitude, and performance.”
Facing Challenges
Although Eagle Waste & Recycling continues to be successful, they have also had their fair share of challenges. For example, Albee points out that pricing pressure from national companies has been and is currently an ongoing challenge. “In order to combat this, our focus has been and will be to continually offer an extremely high level of customer service and support. We have also focused on lines of business or growth areas that were less price sensitive.”
Another challenge the company handles is the region’s extreme seasonality. “This area of northern Wisconsin has the greatest seasonality I have experienced in my 25 years in this business. Revenue in July is more than double what it is during the winter months. Maintaining profitability during the winter and properly staffing for the summer is challenging. We have been lucky since we are always growing so we hire in the spring and our growth over the summer and fall allows us to maintain all staff at a full-time level without any layoffs,” says Albee. In addition, even though revenues drop substantially in the winter, due to heavy snow, icy roads and temperature commonly in the double digit below zero range, routes take much longer in the winter than an equivalent route in the summer. Because there is usually snow on the ground from November to April, it was one of the greatest challenges initially faced when moving to Eagle River, WI. Explains Albee, “Lots of snow and snowplow drivers were using dumpsters as targets. It was very difficult to safely handle containers with rear load trucks. Our guys were wrestling containers out of snowbanks and climbing over them to hook a cable to a rear load container. After the first winter in Eagle River, we knew that we needed to convert to front load. This would greatly reduce the safety concerns of pulling containers through snow and slip/fall issues associated with drivers getting out of trucks. It took two years with our limited access to capital to convert all of our stops.”
Likewise, due to safety and efficiency concerns Eagle Waste & Recycling converted nearly all of their manual residential and municipal collection to semi-automated and automated collection. “Automated collection with the addition of a 96 gallon cart for SSR greatly improves safety, the volume or recycling collected, and allows our great drivers to fulfill the job requirements for more years,” indicates Albee. “Our standard model for municipal trash and recycling collection in this area is to provide a 48 or 64 gallon cart for trash collected weekly and a 96 gallon cart for SSR collected EOW (every other week). This system of limited trash collection is most cost-effective for the customer, is adequate for almost all residents that adequately recycle and typically greatly increases the volume of recyclables collected.”
The company’s greatest recycling challenge includes the collection and processing of glass bottles. The glass is very abrasive to the truck bodies, the tipping floor of the MRF, and the conveyors and screens of the SSR line, causing substantial cost and damage on an annual basis. In addition, the revenue obtained from the sorted glass material is non-existent. “We are lucky if we can get away with hauling it and dumping it for no cost. Additional markets increasing the value of this commodity or a method of reducing the material volume in the recycling stream would be a financial benefit to many MRFs,” says Albee.
The easiest solution to the current challenge of finding a cost-effective home for glass removed by a SSR MRF in Wisconsin would be an increase in need/demand at glass cullet processors such as Strategic Materials. Albee explains that currently, there is only one plant in Wisconsin that accepts this material for further processing. “This facility, located in East Troy, WI does not have the capacity to handle the majority of the material available in the state. Perhaps, due to greater local supply than demand, future capacity at new or existing plants will develop.”
In the meantime, Eagle Waste & Recycling and other MRF companies are looking at other beneficial re-use options for this glass material. Potential options include screening the material to use as aggregate replacement in or below roads or parking lots, and sand blast media. Their local landfill has approval to screen this material and use the glass as an aggregate replacement in the construction of access roads outside of the landfill footprint. This offsets the use of gravel material, which is costly, thus saving them money. Albee says they are currently looking into other similar uses for this material.
Cost-Effective Processing
One of the things that Eagle Waste & Recycling is most proud of is the addition of a state-of-the-art SSR MRF in rural northern Wisconsin. Says Albee, “This area has a need for cost-effective processing of SSR. Since we are located in such a low population area of the state, we need to pull recyclables from a huge geographic area. We also have to enhance recycling programs in areas where it previously was not cost-effective to recycle.” Their business model to provide adequate volume of SSR to cost-effectively operate the MRF includes the long-term process of developing recycling programs where they did not currently exist, such as Bessemer, MI, enhancing programs where they did exist by converting municipalities to volume based fees type programs that promote greater levels of recycling, such as Tomahawk, WI and controlled volume growth of internal hauling operations.
Albee points out that the company is focused on continuing organized growth by increasing density, thereby improving efficiency, as well as improving recycling participation over their vast service area including the northern third of Wisconsin and the entire upper peninsula of Michigan. “Eagle Waste & Recycling is proud of the opportunity to enhance recycling for residents and businesses in Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We intend to continue the growth of our business, especially in the recycling arena, therefore, allowing us to grow our quality labor force and give back to the communities in which we live and work. We consider every residential customer, commercial customer, industrial customer, township, city and county we service as long-term partners in our business. We never take one customer for granted and our goal is to always exceed their service expectations.”
For more information call (715) 477-0077 or visit www.eaglewasteandrecycling.com.
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Key Management
Alan Albee: President/Owner
Brian Albee: MRF Manager-Owner
Gary Albee: Ashland, WI division General Manager-Owner
Dawn Griffin: Office Manager
Jim Whittinghill: Sales Manager
Jeff Page: Maintenance Manager