Innovation key to Paine’s trash-hauling evolution
Excerpt from Hartford Business Journal article: Mike Paine’s family trash business has always been ahead of its time. Looking for ways to be frugal at the start of the Great Depression, Paine’s grandfather Albert, a farmer, came up with an idea to collect garbage from two private schools. In those days — before processed and…
Excerpt from Hartford Business Journal article:
Mike Paine’s family trash business has always been ahead of its time. Looking for ways to be frugal at the start of the Great Depression, Paine’s grandfather Albert, a farmer, came up with an idea to collect garbage from two private schools.
In those days — before processed and pre-packaged groceries — food scraps made up most of the trash, so he brought the waste back to the family farm in Simsbury and fed it to the pigs.
Call it the ancestor of curbside recycling.
“The business has almost come full circle,” said Mike Paine, president of Paine’s Recycling and Rubbish Removal in East Granby. “Now we’re starting to talk about organics recycling, which is really what we were doing back then.”
Decades later, Paine’s, founded in 1929, would become the first trash company in New England to do automated collection and curbside recycling — practices that are now staples of the business.
Read the full article online.
Note from MTAC – Mike Paine serves on the MTAC Board of Directors and is a strong supporter of the association. Congratulations to Paine’s, Inc. for winning 1st Place in the 25-75 full-time employee category of the 2016 Connecticut Family Business Awards.