March/April 2007
What makes a team or company work, according to famed football coach Vince Lombardi, is individual commitment to a group effort. That’s also what’s taken the football-fanatic Harvey family to success with their paper and waste processing company, E.L. Harvey & Sons.
By Lindsay Holst
Walk through Ellen Harvey’s office, take a glance at the wall’s patchwork of photos, newspaper clippings, and Vince Lombardi quotations, and it won’t take you too long to realize that the Harveys are a football-oriented family. Her husband Ben was captain of the Westborough, Mass., high school football team in 1966 and went on to play at Delaware Valley College. Sons Benjamin James (BJ) and Glenn followed in their father’s footsteps in high school and at Fairfield University and Catholic University, respectively. Glenn coaches at Catholic while in graduate school. The family is still an enthusiastic member of the Westborough Athletic Boosters. And don’t even get Ben started on his football analogies.
E.L. Harvey & Sons Inc., the family’s fourth-generation scrap and waste transfer company, is not unlike a football team itself. The starting lineup consists of Ben’s uncle, Jim Harvey, CEO; Ben and his cousins Doug and Steve, co-owners and vice presidents; Ellen, executive vice president; Jim’s daughter, Lynda Harvey-Walcott, sales manager; BJ, director of finance and acquisitions; and Jim’s grandson, Josh, who works in maintenance. With eight Harveys on the ball, the company is tightly knit, able to make important decisions quickly, and always ready to step it up a notch to get ahead of the competition.
Home Turf
The company’s origins are not on a football field but a farm field. Ben’s great-grandfather, Emory Larkin Harvey, moved to the Westborough area, 30 miles west of Boston, in 1911 to begin a cattle business on the 150 acres of land where the company still operates today. Alongside the cattle and dairy farming, the enterprising Harveys “simply always recycled” as another way to support the family, Ellen says.
Back then—just as today—paper was their specialty. As rag dealers, earlier generations of Harveys would collect rags and the fibrous parts of mattresses, wash and clean them, and ship them to mills that turned them into paper. They also collected cardboard, newspaper, and ferrous and nonferrous metals. “I think the Harveys probably got a real chuckle out of all the attention to recycling in the early 1940s” for the war effort, Ellen says. “It was already a livelihood for them.”
By 1949, E.L. Harvey & Sons had given up farming for recycling. When the town of Westborough asked the family to operate an open-burning dump on the property, it agreed. After the state banned the open burning of trash in 1965, the Harveys instead began operating two small landfills and a paper baling operation with a small downstroke baler. A few years later the company installed a pit baler and purchased a roll-off truck to begin hauling waste and recyclables.
At that time E.L. Harvey & Sons was essentially a three-man team: Ben’s father, Bob, worked the yard; Ben’s uncle, Jim, handled sales; and Ben drove the truck. The three would rotate responsibilities for handling waste from the new corporate and industrial accounts they garnered in the Boston and Worcester areas. As the company grew and more family members joined throughout the 1970s, Ben became more involved with operations and marketing recyclables, which prepared him for his eventual shift to overall management. “When your company starts very small and grows throughout the years, you’re never really sure how you transition from one role to the next,” Ben says. “It just happens.”
The company’s focus on corporate and commercial paper recycling came from close observation of the local waste market. In the 1980s, “we saw huge volumes of high-grade office paper in our customers’ trash, and we thought, this needs to be separated out,” Ellen says.
At the time, paper recycling was still a hard sell. She recalls trying to pitch recycling programs to facility managers in the 1980s and early 1990s and consistently being turned down. “They just said, ‘No way. Separate our trash? Are you crazy?’” But once the environmental movement took hold in the 1990s and state mandates came into effect, businesses began to change their tune. “Suddenly, companies wanted to look green,” Ellen says. “No one wanted to be a polluter.”
The Harveys have seen the shift in corporate attitudes and behavior firsthand. “When we started in this business, it was like we went in the back door to visit with a company,” Ben says, referring to the company’s waste-handling roots. “Since recycling has really become prominent, now we’re in the boardrooms. We’re talking to senior executives. It’s not just ‘Take it away, I don’t want to see it anymore,’ it’s ‘How can I be a green company? How I can I help the environment?’ People are continually looking to improve.”
More recently, as data security has becomean issue of corporate concern, the company has begun offering mobile on-site shredding and secure record and document destruction services.
Paper Profits
Two 30,000-square-foot warehouses hold the company’s stock in trade. The firm purchases paper at market price from larger generators and charges collection fees to some of the smaller generators. The bale storage area is stocked with 1,200- to 1,500-pound bales of various grades, including corrugated, which constitutes 50 percent of the paper the operation processes; high-grade paper, another 30 percent; and news, 20 percent. Each warehouse contains a high-density baler, and the company has two sizes of shears designed to split the massive rolls of paper used in commercial printing presses.
A few bales toward the back of the storage area consist of thousands of small squares of colorful paper. “Those are scratched lottery tickets,” Ben says. “Ellen has been working with the Massachusetts Lottery for a couple of years now on a program called ‘Instant Re-Play,’ where people can bring 25 scratched tickets back and get one new ticket.” During 2006 the company collected a remarkable 249 tons of tickets from this program. “We certainly don’t buy the tickets ourselves,” Ellen says. “We know how many people don’t win!”
The paper bales are awaiting shipment, predominately by truck—the facility is within five minutes of nearly all major Massachusetts highways—to mills that recycle them into new products. Ninety percent of the paper the company collects remains in North America, where the shipments are divided more or less evenly between Canada and the United States. Domestically most of the paper stays in the Northeast, but some might travel as far south as Alabama, Virginia, and West Virginia. The company exports the remaining 10 percent, typically to China or India. “It’s a worldwide market,” Ben says. “Depending on where you’ve done your deals, there’s no limit to where the material might end up.”
Treasure from Trash
In addition to recycling paper, E.L. Harvey & Sons still operates a full-service waste transfer and material separation facility. The firm takes whatever its customers have and tries to maximize the recycling value of each load. “Because we are a transfer station, we have to pay disposal fees,” Ben says. “We don’t own landfills, we don’t own waste-to-energy plants, so it’s to our advantage to sort out as much of value as we can.”
Every waste load moves over a conveyor to ensure it contains no further recyclable material, Ben says. He walks over to workers hand-picking a mixed load from a local Whole Foods Market. The material, mostly old produce, food waste, and soiled wrappers, is specked with pieces of corrugated. “This material is coming from a location that doesn’t have the room for a separate compactor for clean corrugated,” Ben says. “They’ll put the corrugated and the paper right in the mixed load, and we’ll bring it back and sort it for them here.” The workers recover as much of the fiber product as they can, tossing the various grades in assorted push-through bunkers behind them. When each bunker fills, it opens on to a conveyor that leads into the baler.
A quick inspection of the sprawling facility shows an array of other recyclables: bales of aluminum cans and plastic bottles, skids stocked with computer monitors, and bunkers of scrap wood, all from customers’ waste streams. “We try to be a one-service provider for all of our customers, so if we’re removing their paper, we’ll also take their computers, their monitors, their televisions,” Ben says.
Teaching Green
Of all their ventures, the Harveys are perhaps most proud of the corporate outreach programs that Ellen creates, implements, and maintains. This free service to their clients achieves two goals: it educates the customers’ employees about what is and is not recyclable and it further refines the loads that the company receives. With corporate clients, for example, one of the biggest problems is contamination from employees dumping waste into recycling bins. “They’ll take coffee grounds and dump them in with the paper; other times, someone will toss a half-full can of Coke into the bin,” Ellen says. “Now they’ve gotten all of that paper wet and dirty.”
She tailors the outreach program to each company’s unique circumstances, such as its geographic location, distribution of buildings, and cafeteria location. For example, “say a company is located in a remote industrial park, not very close to a city,” Ellen says. “Everyone probably filters into a large cafeteria for lunch.” The company would set up an education booth in the cafeteria, and “we would bring in the baskets, raffles, free giveaways. It’s a great venue for taking a few minutes to remind [workers] about their company’s recycling program,” she says. If the company is in an urban area where employees go out for lunch, she instead would set up a booth in a high-profile location, such as the building’s foyer, to attract attention from employees entering and leaving the building.
Putting weight behind the recycling advice is the Harveys’ detailed knowledge of their clients’ waste and recycling streams. They will take a customer’s trash compactor, empty it out on the sorting floor, and audit the waste stream to see how much office paper and other fiber material is really being recycled and how much is being sent to the trash. “If there’s a lot of paper in the waste stream, we can actually target the department that isn’t recycling as much” by looking at the contents of the waste, Ellen says. Correcting such behavior might involve going desk-to-desk in offices, meeting with department heads, and even organizing field trips to the Harvey facilities. “I just had a group from Bose [Corp.] come in,” Ellen says. “They toured the facility, had lunch, then came back and discussed what they saw. It’s a great program.”
Or she and her team might need to carry the recycling message to a building’s custodial staff, going in after hours to train them. “These key people are often overlooked,” she says. “They are the last people to touch those recyclables in an office building before the material gets picked up, so they’ve got to know what they’re doing.”
This outreach helps the company get more recyclable material out of its collections, but it also carries the recycling message to a greater audience, Ellen says. “We’re committed to recycling financially and environmentally.”
The Family Brand
The Harvey name is on everything connected to E.L. Harvey & Sons. It’s emblazoned in bold lettering on the sides of the company’s roll-off trucks, portable shredding operations, compactors, and containers, making every item a rolling billboard. “We take incredible pride and responsibility in our work because it’s our name out there,” Ellen says.
The Harvey family dynamic pervades every aspect of the business, and it’s frequently difficult to distinguish one from the other. “We never really leave E.L. Harvey & Sons,” Ben says. “Whether we’re at a family outing or whether it’s simply Ellen and me sitting at the dinner table, we eat, breathe, live our business.” Jim remembers one particular Thanksgiving dinner when his wife announced at one point that there would be no more talking business for the rest of dinner. “Not a sound was made for 15 minutes,” Jim says, “because no one could think of anything else to talk about!”
As a private, family-owned company, the Harveys say they can make and act on decisions much faster than a public company could. “We don’t have to go to a board of directors or outside investors to decide to buy a truck or baler or to put up a building,” Ben says. “We can make that decision in one meeting.” In fact, that’s how the company makes big business-related decisions or solves problems. All family members involved in the business “come together and agree on something, and if we don’t all believe in that decision, we won’t do it,” Ellen says. “Our ideas can be changed by listening to the arguments and opinions from other family members because, in the end, we all want this company to grow, to be healthy and prosperous, and that’s the key. We all have the same ultimate goal.”
When pressed, the Harveys admit mixing family and business so completely can be a challenge. “You never, ever leave your business,” Ellen says. “Seven days a week, 24 hours a day … one of the Harveys is always on call.
“That sounds easy, but it’s a huge commitment,” she says. “We’ve got 7,000 customers; we’ll get calls at three or four o’clock in the morning.”
She describes a night a few years ago when Ben got an emergency call just as they were leaving the house to attend a Christmas benefit in Boston. One of the company’s corrugated compactor machines at a nearby Whole Foods Market had jammed. Ben knew which driver was on call, and he also knew that it would have taken the driver nearly two hours to get to the customer. “Ben didn’t want to take the driver away from his family around the holidays,” Ellen says, so the couple went themselves, in tuxedo and gown, to meet a very bewildered store manager. They unclogged the jam, washed their hands, and drove on to their party. “You never get a break from the business,” she says, “so you’ve got to really love it”—and they do.
Home Field Advantage
E.L. Harvey & Sons has deep personal and professional ties to Westborough, a town of about 18,000 people and site of a variety of high-tech manufacturing businesses and corporate headquarters. “The community has just opened its arms to us over the years,” Ellen says. “People build homes overlooking our facility. Basketball team booster clubs come here on Saturdays, Girl Scouts sell their cookies here right in front of our office building, politicians have come here to hand things out, talk to people, and shake hands.”
The feeling is mutual. “This is our community,” Ben says. “We work here, and we don’t leave it to go home every day. We live here, and we feel that we need to give back.” In addition to its support of athletics, the company gives to a variety of other local charities, including Toys for Tots and the local food pantry.
With these close community relationships, a huge step for the company—one that required lots of “discussion and soul-searching,” Ellen says—was its first acquisitions outside of Westborough: the September 2005 purchase of waste removal company Action Waste Services and February 2006 purchase of Rick Lamarre & Son Inc. The next step in the company’s growth plans is a huge expansion project that has financial challenges—and strong opposition from its neighbors—but as a family and as a company “we will get through it,” Ellen says.
The recommendation to expand through acquisition came from a member of the fourth generation of Harveys in the business, BJ. “When BJ came back from his first scrap job to work for us, he said we had to stop trading customers with competitors,” Ellen says. “If you really want to grow, you have to start buying companies.”
BJ’s “combination of youth and experience really provide the company with an interesting new dynamic,” Ellen says. “It gives everyone a sense of future and continuity.”
Looking Ahead
The Harveys’ newest endeavor is a construction and demolition recycling facility they plan to have operational by March 2007. Massachusetts recently banned the disposal of certain C&D materials, such as wood, metal, asphalt, brick, and concrete. Contractors saw a dead end; the Harveys saw a business opportunity. The new C&D operation will sort ferrous, nonferrous, wood, and fiber construction debris using air systems, trommels, water systems, and hand-sorting, Ben says. “Instead of putting out five different containers at construction job sites to separate all the different materials, we will put it all in one container and do all the separation at our new building,” he explains. “This saves a lot of space on the construction job sites, something that is really lacking right now. If we want to continue to provide our customers with good disposal options, we need to do this.”
Ben believes this new facility is a savvy move for the company. “We’re not just keeping up with our environment, we’re ahead of the competition.” He’s looking two or three plays ahead, adapting to whatever is thrown in his path, and never losing sight of the goal.
Lindsay Holst is assistant editor of Scrap.
What makes a team or company work, according to famed football coach Vince Lombardi, is individual commitment to a group effort. That’s also what’s taken the football-fanatic Harvey family to success with their paper and waste processing company, E.L. Harvey & Sons.