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Friends wondered out loud if Peter Karter had "lost his mind" when he decided to get into the waste recycling business in the 1970s. Nothing in his background suggested the remotest possibility that he would become a modern day version of the ultimate junk dealer. An engineer by profession, he distinguished himself in the military, designed and built nuclear reactors for the American Machine and Foundry Co., and worked as a self-employed engineering consultant. Karter says the idea of starting a recycling business first occurred to him when he observed one day in the early 1970s how much trash an apartment complex generates. "It struck me that the total for the whole country had to be enormous, especially for containers."
He looked up the statistics. "The numbers were all in the millions of tons. There had to be value in all that waste, and it was just being thrown away. Moreover, people I talked to in industry all said their raw material costs were rising. I remember one remark that really stuck in my mind. An owner of a paper products company said: 'The trees keep moving farther away from the mill'."
So in 1975, Karter and a few associates started Resource Recovery Systems (RRS) in a century old foundry in Branford, Connecticut. The foundry became the first materials recovery facility (MRF), in the U.S. Since then, the number has grown to at least 192--five of which are operated by RRS. The company has four MRFs in the planning or construction phase.
In pioneering the concept, RRS went through some lean times. "For years we barely scraped by financially," says Karter. "An office was a desk and chair and maybe a telephone. Only by the most barebones economy did we survive. Just in the last five years have we become profitable." Karter and his band of mechanical wizards tinkered away amid a Rube Goldberg assortment of conveyors and hoppers and strange-looking machines that helped to separate glass, paper and aluminum from commingled refuse. The idea was to automate as much as possible the process of sorting recyclables into clean, saleable products and train humans to do everything the machines couldn't do. "We thought when we started that collection would be the big problem and that...