welcome to recycled Idaho for to recycling industry veterans bread Eckart Nick Snyder explore Idaho businesses and organizations that are putting in the work to keep Idaho environmentally and economically viable at the same time take a listen to how these entrepreneurs business owners and operators from making things happen in the great state of Idaho in this podcast Nick and I made our way over to Burley Idaho sit down with Josh barley may and Nate Francisco southern Idaho solid waste these two guys are making waves in the solid waste industry and they’re doing it right here in Idaho take a listen and go check out the youtube version of this podcast is there are some great videos shot of the landfill’s daily operations sadder southern ice all the way thanks for taking the time Josh much appreciated so for those of you that don’t know out there Josh bar bar bar Clemente is the CEO and the president of southern Iowa solid waste for those of you who don’t know about sundown solid waste Joshua give us a little background the structure kind of the organization so we’re capable one of a kind operation I didn’t

know how kind of we were until I started to look at other solid waste districts in the United States and I found that we operate in dependently of anybody else that we’ve seen out there generally speaking when you have a salt waste district you have an enterprise fund and whatever a revenue you generate it operated it it basically funds you for whatever you need to we’re not like that and the big thing that kind of sets us apart from any other business is everybody’s in it to make money right okay we’re not going to make money we’re owned by seven counties so in south central Idaho we basically handle all of the solid waste disposal for eleven thousand square miles we’ve got seven different counties that own the solid waste district and when you talk about our operation once the garbage man picks up the waste from your house they take it to one of our facilities that’s called the transfer station so they dispose all of their waste at the transfer station but it’s still got to get to the landfill so once that garbage man comes to one of our sites they

dispose of all of their solid waste on the tipping floor and then we push that waste into a truck and then we haul it from one of our 15 sites to our Regional Landfill and then we place it in the landfill for final disposal so we can handle every aspect of solid waste – picking it up from your curbside and then we also have a lot of diversion programs in between so we run by seven count we’ve been in the business since 1994 and we’ve been operating ever since and I think when you talk about solid waste and the way that we’re set up I think a lot of people look at the advantages that we had with taking advantage of the economies of scale with all seven counties and reducing the total cost of your operation and I think since we’ve been in here for you know about 25 years the counties who own this they really take a look and they understand the benefit that we provided them because our costs are so low compared to anybody else you know you’re looking at tipping fees are tipping fees are at $16 a ton

which is which is she is ready to go to state speaking lot of companies or again officially stuck on the northwest coast and that’s unheard of right even one of the counties which counties of what are the seven counties so the southern counties that own us are Twin Falls County is the largest county with population we go as far north as Blaine County which is the Sun Valley Ketchum Bellevue area we go as far west as good in County the Lincoln County as well jerome county kenji county and Minidoka camera so basically the chunk of south south central Idaho is our district how many regional landfills are there then if you have seven counties how many regional ones are broken down so out of the regional system in the state by though we are the only regional solid waste district as of right now because of the economies of scale and flexibility that we have in our operation you’ve got other counties that are starting to look at solid waste as race in the state and now in the south east side of the state there’s a new solid waste district that’s trying to

form and they’re trying to take the same structure that we have and do the same you know duplicate what we’re doing a mr. I know that’s awesome and the tipping fees do you read evaluate those year-to-year or they’ve been pretty consistent so we our budget is really difficult you know because we’re owned by seven different counties when killing is typically have a bunch of meaning right they’re looking at one department and one department is your operations your employees right we’ve got seven different counties and not only are we doing landfill we also have transportation we have operations of transfer stations we have a landfill gas to energy facility that we’re producing a salsa or a kiss iago so we’re pretty sporadic and we’ve got a lot of moving parts here and you don’t realize how I’m deaf you are unless you’re a part of this always district you know one thing is we don’t want to be on the news for everything native obviously but we want to be the news for things that are positive and our direction is let’s keep costs low for our counties nobody can ever complain about

that you know and that’s what we take pride in our tipping fee of $16 per ton is I think one of the lowest in the nation we’ll probably the lowest one percent of the industry but a typical tipping fee for the state of Idaho is 55 and even even up in northern especially exerts I could transfer in the middle of that if you know seems like that’s where you get them to your higher tip fees just kind of an outside perspective looking in as when you gotta go to a transfers facility that then has to go to the actual landfill where the material is getting processed yeah you’re right and in a lot of those situations too you know a transposition might be owned by a private company and the landfill might be owned by I can’t hear a private company as well so then there’s always middleman in between that as well the good thing about us is we own everything in between so our whole goal is keeping costs low you know that’s not to jump over things that are important like safety as well you know that’s a horrible thing is

let’s keep the cost low so that our residents aren’t getting overcharged for solid waste so if we keep them happy in turn we can have a good operation and do what we do so let’s back it up the training like a little bit and out of the landfill apart and just talk about you kind of your background where you came from how you got into the landfill industry and just kind of give everybody a little bit of perspective you’re a young guy you know you’ve done pretty well with where you’re at and it’s just I always think it’s good to take young people and say explain to me how you got here what the path was where you going to school what got you involved in that industry and just kind of expanding on that for a little bit so the one thing that I’ve noticed in solid waste you talk about people’s stories they don’t have a story that says when I was a little kid I want it to be in some ways you know it seems like you just end up in solid waste because you know it’s a lot like

any other profession but my track to get where I was was a little bit off the beaten path I went to school of Washington State University on baseball scholarship I loved Washington State we visit there every year we go back to football once I was done with school I got into the workforce right and I I’d like to do stuff I like to be physical I grew up in a construction household my dad ran projects you know from me being a little kid I can remember going out jobsite stricken forms and whining forms so I knew I wanted me something like that it just so happened the way the parts fell there was a guy on gate business and security gates together and he hired me because a job and we were talking and you already graduated screw up that way but and you said they’d like to offer you this job and I’m thinking why are you off we don’t know anything about and we just we have a conversation we we had a great conversation you know we just clicked and he offered me a job so for about four years I

was traveling between Twin Falls and Sun Valley you’re putting big intricate metal gates at big homes and I really liked it you know and it’s not they’re not big construction projects but those smaller construction projects you know that’s what I learned organizational and when I bought my first house I actually bought my first house across the street from the guy who ran a solid waste district and we were neighbors we were good friends but I always flew my washington state flag and he went to university of washington so during football season we always do that but that’s what started our relationship was the camaraderie between football and wash you know the state of Washington and he had a job open up for an environment specialist he knew what I went to school for I went to school active a lot of environmental science classes and he said you know you should take a look at this job at the time and had an insurance I was paying for my vacation I thought this could be great I said you know kids at the time so I had to start providing where you still like

to take a gun company yeah I still with the gate company and so I took a look at the job description I applied and I didn’t think much of it you know I didn’t think I was gonna get the job but it was a great opportunity so I applied and came out did my interview and we still clicked and he hired me for the job I was the environmental specialist for five years with Southern Idaho solid waste and we had a really good working relationship when I was doing the environmental specialist stuff you know media environment my program I was in charge of a diversion program that we had I was in charge of and I that first five years is a good opportunity for me to network with the people in the organization you know inside and from the people who are doing it you know I was visiting the transfer stations out what’s going on what do you guys need know at the time I couldn’t get them what they needed I still you know wanted to know what they did if I could do something I would and I learned a

lot from that and when my boss retired I really didn’t think that I wanted to be to see you know right away I know I wanted to someday but so I submitted my application and I submitted my resume and my whole thing was I wanted the board to understand that I wanted a job in the future and it just so happened that they hired me that and I didn’t know that I was ready for the job but I got a really competitive spirit and when they offered it to me I was like okay this is it you know this is my opportunity so flag was there and when I was hired that was eight years ago and got a lot of really good improvements here at salt waste district since then so we’ve just been building on those relationships and it’s been a little bit of a weird you know transition I have to wear a mat but I wouldn’t change it because I love what I do I love the people that we see in sports mana I always said team sports are huge anybody’s played team sports whether you’re middle school high

school college or beyond like that when it comes to business there’s such a transfer of how to be on a team when there’s a bunch of different personalities a bunch of different alpha males or females or whatever that saying is like it just teaches you a lot on how to get involved which a lot of businesses like an organization like this especially from yours from your position is you’re trying to get a bunch of people to get along and work with each other and fight for the same goals and I’ve always said team sports just man they the trends are so much in the business yeah you learn a lot you know when you’re a little kid you don’t understand the things that you’re learning in sports but you have you always want to win you know but at the same token you’re also looking at the people who are coaching you and they’re seeing how they’re getting your team to work together towards goals so you know even though others many sports I did that I learned a lot from that but you really you realize that you know your team is an

organization together essentially the coach and it’s up to you on whether you have a winning team or not and it really comes down to it’s all on my shoulders and we’re a big proponent of lead by example and that goes back to sports we never want somebody on the team that’s not given their all yeah because everybody you know they get disappointed with those players so it makes you all strive to be the best that you can be that’s what I’ve found it no I think it’s I think it’s huge so when you took it over when you went from the environmental specialists to now CEO president what was like a desert big surprise or there’s something to just kind of like the difference between the two positions or just the difference once you kind of got to the top and you can now became the coach so something you have the kind of major eyes get big the number one apparent thing is I told you earlier that I like to be active yeah so I went from a real active role where I was always out doing stuff to sit in front

of my computer so first like two years of this job I gained like 40 pounds because I wasn’t learned you know I wasn’t even learn I was in front of my computer any tile the material that I could get I wanted to grasp and retain and so I put on some pounds for that but that was the negative thing I’d say the biggest surprise that I went to cover was I had an OPS mine you know my mind is something that if somebody says hey do you think we could do it this way I say yes before we can and I figure it out afterwards but when I figured out I want it to be the right way so I’m like I’m gonna get it done person yeah and I’m good with money too but that was never part of my job you know I had my budget my things that I needed to take care of but now we’ve got a 10 million dollar budget that we’re talking about and how did he get that we had a very intricate budget I was talking about earlier and I’d say that was the biggest

learning curve but you know luckily our CFO was our first employee that we hired with the solid waste district so who better to learn from than the person that’s been doing it the longest so she spent some time with me and if it wasn’t for her I still be lost but she taught me the ropes and I’d say the first year the finances were the biggest issue but I know that I’ve got good people in place so even though I didn’t know everything from the beginning I had a lot of respect for the people that had been and I knew that they’ve shown in the rope so no that makes sense understand so what do you think the biggest challenge that’s the biggest challenge that you kind of face but what is the what’s the biggest challenge that the benefits always industry-based this thing that you’re seeing right now maybe just from your perspective in Idaho or as a whole I mean what’s what’s kind of a big to big I don’t know I’m thinking that were just the biggest challenge that you’re gonna see you’re seeing right now to get people understand

what you do every day is that one of them yeah I think if you don’t know solid waste if you’ve never had a job in solid waste you don’t know what to expect and you’ve got a lot of assumptions about what the solid waste industry is and I think that you know we’re kind of in the same boat with that is you guys have scrap and worth of landfill right so people don’t always think the highest of landfill people or scrap people right correct but it doesn’t mean that we’re bad people that’s just your assumption from the beginning of what we do and my feeling is people don’t know what we do so it’s our job to let them know what we do and we have a lot of great people that work for us and we have a lot of people that get things done that work behind the scenes so just trying to change the the perception of the solid waste industry to be professional and efficient and well Randy that’s been our biggest you know issue but I think with the last three or four years of the projects that we’ve

done here at the landfill you know I think our community he’s starting to understand why solid waste is such an important infrastructure you know you think of water and sewer and the lights and you think man if we don’t have lights and what are we gonna do yeah but flip that script and say well if there were nobody coming around to pick up the garbage what you do you know and so it’s it’s important and it’s important for your community to know what it is that you do so that’s that’s a big challenge for us and you just got to stay steadfast at it and stay with the community but that’s always you know how do you get the information to the community with this social media internet how do you is there newsletters how do you get new information to them if you’re they you want something done a little different on their end so we try to do stuff as efficient and effective as we can we don’t have a lot of people out there pushing that stuff through you know we don’t have a public outreach coordinator we are very lean

so for us it pays to have good relationships with people in the community so we have something that’s going on most of the time the news outlets are approaching us about it but if they’re not approaching us about something that’s going on we’ve been able to then and they’ve been able to get the word out for us on a lot of this stuff other than that you know we do internal emails and stuff we don’t do newsletters but if you check our website it’s just sis w.org we do a lot of things we think videos a big thing in the future we hired some people who did some videos together because we asked ourselves the same question how did we get this information out well so we took it upon ourselves to hire digital company to come in and show people what we are what we did and we put those on our website every time we go out to we give a lot of civic presentations too rubbery Kiwanis stuff like that so that’s another way that we can get our information out of the community so do this you’ve talked you’ve

kind of referred to a couple of projects and I’ve seen it with my own eyes and I can’t hate to should put my video but give us kind of a couple big projects that you guys have done here and what I love about with the recycled hydro podcast or a love life interviewing you is you just serve even your logo right you have the state of Idaho with the recycling the International Cycling symbol people don’t want to think about landfills they don’t think about recycling the theme of scrap metal we’ve been in recycling you know since the turn of century people don’t think about scrap metal recycling business as a recycling business right it’s a good moral commodities business the landfill the same thing I think people realize how much recycling is going on and not just recycling from a commodity standpoint we’re recycling again or something like that so just touch on a few of your kind of big projects that you’ve implemented since you’ve been here and kind of just a brief explanation of how they worked so I might say probably the biggest project that we’ve done in recent years we

don’t look at the energy facility so when we place waste in the landfill waste starts to be most it’s just like if you’re at your house and you throw something in the trash in the open the trash bin you can start to smell that putrid gas that’s the beginning of landfill gas so when you take that trash and put it in the landfill it actually decomposes more and it creates a landfill gas but it’s is a gas it can be emitted in the atmosphere but we’re regulated to take that manage our gas and deconstruct it or do something a beneficial wicked so in 2014 we started looking at what do we do you know we create this resource out there that is a mentor resource just like oil or you know any other resource and we’re sitting at this table I’m talking with my board of directors and they say look you know if we had oil underneath of us we tap into it or if we had gold mine you know we’d be mine know why we’re not doing something with this gasps so we started take a look at our options and

see what we could do and it came down to constructing a landfill gas to energy facility so right now we’re producing enough gas off of the landfill to send it through a lot of different processes you guys can see it a little bit but we’re producing enough electricity to power about 2,000 small homes and that’s just coming off of the landfill you know so when you can do a beneficial use project off of something that you’re producing naturally for us we’re trying to get a win-win you know and everybody knows costs are going up right now and the only way we can generate more revenue is for us to raise our fees we don’t want to do that if we don’t have to so we sold this well not so this the board saw this project is a revenue generator and because is generating revenue off the power of production it will allow us to keep our costs lower for longer so that was a four year project for us that we jumped proves for you know I have a power with purchase agreement to return these financing operations construction so that

was a pretty difficult challenge but we got through it we got good people in place and it was probably the most fun that dollar amount wise start to finish what’s in what’s the investment in a project like that for you guys so it’s it’s not Jenny you know you hear billion-dollar projects is five hundred million dollar projects but for us it was an eight million dollar project and for us and eight million dollars right so big eight million dollars is a big project when your annual budgets around ten right so maybe it’s basically taking your but even though you’re spreading over four years and your get your finance and some of the equipment or however that works it’s still a project because all of us though of the entity is doing the project I mean you look at the same way if we were to buy a piece of equipment through some big large scrap metal recycling company they would they buy 5 centavos of material handlers in a given period if we buy one every a couple of years we feel like we’re doing pretty good so I think it just it’s

all the size of the entity that’s doing the project so to throw that on top you’re in a great point we don’t have a ten million dollar budget an eight million dollar project so another thing that my board asked me to do was can you implement the project without raising particularly fee so we had to implement an eight million dollar project on a ten million dollar operating budget without increasing the tipping fee of $16 per ton that was the difficult part you know that’s a lot to do that’s a big asking we just kept trekking along and driving along until we got it done so that was it was a big project but it was at the end of the tunnel when you complete those projects you know it’s always hey we did we did you know we didn’t hire somebody we did it’s always great to hear we talk about that all the time internally is you know when we take on a project whether it’s a podcast whatever I think we like to do it the work ourselves I mean we could hire somebody we could do this we could do that

but I think you learned the most about it when you do do it yourself and you you know you get input from a lot of we’ve taken input and guy log great input and feedback from a lot of different sources you know do this and try this and look at it this way or whatever the case may be but when you do it yourself it just I mean it’s a game changer because now you know that feel inside now and another thing that was a big thing for us you know the switchover is we would hire people to come in and do a job but we would always send one or two employees with them so we had some history and you know we know it’s not like – and it was you know employers coming back to us and we could do it a little bit better you know why are we hiring somebody when we can do it and you know it was my employers approaching nice and let’s do more we could do this yeah it’s kind of like okay if you want to do it let’s do it you know and

it’s just built on – now we’re doing so many projects that solid ways you not being solid waste would be doing you know and that’s stuff that we like in our employees life and it builds them it’s just this you know it’s a sustainable business with your employees they don’t want to do the same thing every single day so we can get these things out there they they love the channel engine they like to complete them and they like to tell me I did it good so it’s recycling that’s final second meter that’s that is recycling it it’s not you know recycling could be a ton of things it can be cardboard it can do them in cans it can be mulch but people just kind of think that one slips they’re mine you know landfill gas nagatomi 2,000 homes look the ability to power two thousand pounds locally and you’re driving and you’re keeping the tip knees down you know we just people don’t realize how important that is adjusted it this is the granular level of the individual household but when you talk about businesses that are you know they’re paying to

get rid of materials whether you’re building projects ok I think it makes we talk about people with developing facilities to some in Idaho part of that is is what’s our what’s it gonna cost us to get rid of you know the ways what’s it gonna cost us for building demo what’s it gonna cost us for I mean some of those costs get figured in and there’s are some kind of sometimes driving factors to get people to move from California or Washington Oregon to Ida tip design what’s the what’s the what’s the power cost yeah that’s that’s all what we’re seeing right now I mean in our area I know open the boys here it’s you’ve seen a lot of growth too but I think probably the minute or the magic Valley area is probably the second highest in growth in the last four or five years and we’re seeing the things that you’re talking about you know we’re seeing City Council’s and County Commissioners and economic develop many companies getting together and knowing how good of a business environment Idaho has and they’re bringing things out like look at the you know rate for

power electorate Kawada juice all the waste disposal things and we have seen a lot of huge companies come into our area you know Chobani Clif Bar there’s probably 15 20 companies in here that have had you know huge huge investments and that’s a turn of something that we’re dealing with you know it’s just good business all around right now it’s been a five-year stretch for us and something like that and I would assume that they could come to next shivani you know as much power as they use and as I would assume that create a decent amount of ways solid waste I mean those are two big decision factors when they decide where we’re gonna no real rockin taxes power costs I saw on these tipping fees and those are you know those are being line items for that they are and our company unfortunately because we’re not on the economic development know we’re not we’re proving these companies and we don’t sit on boards where we are recruiting those companies you know weird the esophagus so it’s great that the community is growing but that just makes us have to be that

much more flexible you know because we are not always expecting the added volume you know so we just have to deal with it and you know read you know calculate our moves and do it the right way so it’s been interesting but it’s been great you know we’ve seen just in the last five years our solid waste volumes go from two hundred thousand tons to two hundred and sixty thousand times that’s a huge you know that expanding set in about five years or a five year five year time span that’s what that is that’s not you’re out yep how many more employees does that take to handle that much more volume I mean is I mean is it a double of the employee this is a triple um and how many more the same when you took over as president to today how many more people are in the organization than when you started so when I started we were approximately right at the 5055 mark full-time employees right now we’re about 75 we’ve got about 80 total employees but so we’ve increased about 20 employees during that time but it’s it’s not

just from an additional solid waste you know since I’ve taken over we didn’t do waste all before so we didn’t have trucks we weren’t hauling our waste back and forth we didn’t do a couple counties but when I took over we saw we were going to see a huge increase on our contract at least a 25% increase and at that point Stephanie our CFO and I sat down and said look this is a huge increase what we bid against ourselves when we purchased our own trucks you know whatever we did it and so that added some additional employees this landfill gas the energy facility adds employs I’d say at the landfill itself we probably added five employees from the two thousand two hundred thousand tons to now so we haven’t really increased a lot just because it’s always volumes it’s because our roof is open and we’ve gone down so many different avenues we’ve opened up our market you know so but it’s been good you know we don’t have a lot of people we like to stay with what we have and I like to incentivize my people if we are doing the

work of ten people and we’re only doing it with eight we try to see how can we accommodate that can we do something else for that if we’re saving that money maybe that means we can be more efficient with some equipment that we’re purchasing with them so it’s it’s been a good five-year growth period and it’s been nice to see everything get to where it’s at but you know my feeling is it’s not slowing down right now see it’s slowing down too much in the next couple of years in our area yes Simon made earlier in I mean it’s you know we have the windows shut from light purposes but you look outside right now and there’s you guys got some good snow last night one thing about the landfill industry I’ve noticed rain sleet snow shine 110 negative 10 the trash don’t stop coming you know the waste doesn’t stop coming you have to be able to work in all conditions here’s the deal in 25 years of operation I think we’ve only closed our doors early or for the day six times in 25 years so you’ve had a lot of

events through them and it’s true you know we had a fire a couple of years ago up in some valley and we had to close the transfer station down for two weeks and we got over 300 phone calls what do we do with our guard you know what do we do and we just had to deal with them we were able to you know with sheriff’s deputies going in and firefighters and stuff but it goes to show you know they came to us and said can you open up do it facility so it’s a need you know it’s something that people are relying on and it’s something that you come to expect a solid waste disposal and that’s the thing about you know the landfill industry is nobody likes to talk about it unless their tragedies are disappearing you know I was talking post that the other day on that speech I gave to the last year Boise State and I want to tell my wife you know they think about trash recycling landfills the blue bin and great bin that’s it they’re on to the next one it’s that’s why it’s super important

to understand like how it works I mean it’s super important to they take the time as a community governor or whatever just understand what the landfill is doing for you because that two-week period comes with there’s a fire or something happens and your trash doesn’t disappear and it starts piling up in your garage or outside your house then everybody seems to become a medical expert right what should we do how do you handle this like we’ve been doing this for a long time so our model is we like to be proactive instead of be reactive so you know anything that we think is going to be a problem try to be proactive and fix it but I think you hit the nail you know you have to know your business and I think when you look around the solid waste organizations or departments around the United States I think you can look at how they operate and know if the person knows the business or not because you got to know what the business is and what you need to do to make the community right and your county commissioners or your board

or your boss or whoever it is you have to know the business and in order to have a good solid waste operation you have to know the business in and out then I’m not just talking about me but the people that we have you know I trust these guys with knowing exactly what to do and how to operate so this is a good thing so real quick what do you what are you doing the most about your job what do you enjoy the most about the industry what gives you like each other we just go it’s the people you know the first thing I do every morning but when I come in as I talk with my key people whether that’s you know calling somebody at a different site or just coming in time with the CFO or the environment manager and say hey what’s what’s on the agenda this week and just talking to people that’s the best thing is we’ve got some really great people and you don’t know that much doctor and you know the thing that gets me up every morning is providing a safe work environment for our employees

that they can come in they can get a decent competitive wage and provide for their family and be safe and go home every night to do it and that’s really what gets me up and gets me going every time one of the people that we you know work with every day Nick what do you got I saw you’re in that 40 under 40 I think I saw that on LinkedIn if you could go back and give yourself maybe some advice when you’re in your 20s to build your career or someone else in their 20s what would you do in that same person that is trying to be a professional build his career they’re trying to establish them so how would you track that person to the landfill industry so I attract people to landfill industry every time I talk to them you know I try to get a statement to get away from what people think and I try to tell them what reality is about the solid waste industry and if it’s highly engineered there’s a lot of science by it there’s a lot of business in it there’s a big money into

being equipment and if you want to come in the same thing every day solid waste isn’t your gig you know but this is something that you come in and out we have four year projects that happen and you just got a plug away on them so it’s not the same thing every day and I think that’s really important but the biggest advice I could give to somebody coming in is if you’re entering the workforce and you really don’t know a lot about it or even you do you know you might have a college degree in it you don’t know the business yet so my biggest advice is get involved in business but be as quiet as possible don’t make comments just for the first year yeah suck it all so here headed Evelyn listen you know get all of that information and if you do that I think after a year of doing that and starting to implement those things you learn you pickle a lot of pieces from the people that we work with or the people you work for and their direction of the company and you get some inside information well

instead of coming in with your own ideas ideas there in place and it you start talking beforehand you know it starts to get the wheels off the track so listening and just absorbing everything that’s the biggest piece of advice but solid waste and recycling industry is a great industry in I’ve talked with a woman who works up at Republic services of the Boise and she said you know I started working at Republic Services out of college and I came here and the gal and I was taking the job for she said oh you’re gonna love this job once you’re in solid waste you never leave and she looked at the girl and said I mean this is just a stepping stone I’m not gonna be here for more than a couple of years now I think she’s been with the company for 20 years no what it is and it’s a great yeah seal and there’s a future there I mean from the culture you guys that have here I mean people could really see that there is a future there’s room for growth if they can put their head down it’s not going

anywhere right I mean it’s consistent I mean it’s it’s consistent but it’s it’s growing I mean there’s gonna be more recycling in five meters than there’s gonna be less personally I mean there’s gonna be better methods of doing things in five years not the same methods and I think that’s what always I love about 3:17 street is it’s always changing some new somes something’s coming something different and I said that was what almost been exciting for me was it was always something new around the corner you know there was a project or a piece of equipment or a way of handling something or a new place to ship it or whatever it was it was never just the same old day-to-day you know yeah I know to expect I’m gonna be here for 40 years yeah cuz we get that question a lot too like what do you guys do is it the same thing every day absolutely not there’s always a new curveball every day almost you know oh I didn’t see that and then with us we’ve both been doing the recycling for a long time everyone at this

table but I’m learning new stuff all the time or things change or the vendor for this product goes somewhere else you know so I think even being not really new to the industry continuing to learn that’s what going to those Expos like at BSU coming up in March like those are really educational for myself because I don’t know a lot about the landfill end of it but it’s nice for us to go there just to learn that much more kind of how we can help you guys on the metal recycling yeah so give this up introduce our real quick before we go tell us about the deal Mars toasts about I know your involvement in the industry and kind of how your you know what your position is there and kind of how you help promote the so the I know solid waste association is made up of anybody in the solid waste and recycling industry in the state of Idaho we’ve got about 175 members which is quite a bit you know it’s pretty big Organization for solid waste and recycling but I think that just goes to show how much interest there

is anybody who has a facility in Idaho as a part of what we do we get together two times a year one time in the spring it’s an educational conference so anything that’s going on in the industry we hit that we have probably 30 presentations on a two-day period and then we have operator training before that as well so it’s a good opportunity for anybody that’s in the solid waste industry whether you’re an engineer or an operator and our anything to just be a part of network with people and hit industry trends so that’s kind of what we do we also do a tour in the fall where we go to a solid waste site and we can do it to date – and we see as much as we can this last year we went up to Roosevelt Washington and we looked at a very large landfill up there and then a small city landfill so we’d like to get out and see what other people are doing because we know that’s where you learn and you can take some – to put in your operation I’m the president this always Association right now

I’m on my last year I’ve been a part of a step away for a long time and I know that we’ve done a lot to get it organized and get a direction for that I know salt waste Association and I know with all the people that we have in place with the Association or takes over next I know they’ll take that ball and run and just keep giving organization a little bit better each year so I love it in on this question just because I think it’s super fat fascinating depends on the individual but give me a comment or somebody in your life that you know that’s whether it’s in the industry how the industry is someone that’s kind of stood out to you that’s kind of helped you know make you successful to me or successful you know four years old you know you see the president of a pretty large corporation not even the corporation that’s it it’s like an extension of two entity right but what’s give me somebody that’s really stood out to you I’d say probably for you know non-business mentors I’d say you know my parents my

dad was in the construction industry his whole life and that was great to see you know in the operations site on that my parents were the worst growing up my mom was a loan officer so she really banged into my head you know had a good credit paying your bills so I got the financial side from her and the off side from him and you know you get stuff from your parents morals and personality so I got a lot of good things for gold they framed who I was as as a person you know along with my stepmom as well my stepmom and my dad raised me I’m I lived with them growing up I visited my mom quite a bit every other weekend so you get these things from your parents and they shaped me who I am I have got faults and I know it but they did a good job on trying to get the good morals out there for business and then I’d say as far as business goes a mentor it sounds kind of weird but my wife you know every time that I think I want to do

something or I’m kind of what do I want to join this board I want to do this she’s always the person behind me supporting me saying hey this is good for you you’d be good at it do it so that’s not something she pushes you to do things she doesn’t mean to be a better provider your comfort zone probably and I mean that’s that’s a good spouse when you get yeah you want the stops to build you up right yeah and my wife is she’s that person I mean it’s awesome so between him did foundation from you know all three grants and then having the support from my wife you know I would say all that a mentor me to be the person ten years all right last one somebody wants to get a hold of you directly what’s the best way our emails really easy si SW for southern I know it’s always so sis W org my email is J Bartley may be a RTL omes I said I’m not working I’m also a LinkedIn – so Josh Parker family didn’t any of those it won’t be and contact me information is on

the website world-in-itself thank you sir appreciate the time Thank You Jesse Josh yes thank you for listening to another episode of recycled Idaho and as we continue the journey across this great state we look forward to bringing you more stories of people and organizations putting in the work to do the right thing