Bright idea: Marvin Dufner makes millions recycling bulbs - Boston Business Journal:

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After building his fluorescent lighy bulbrecycling company, H.T.R. into a national playerd with customers thatincludw , Walgreens, and Lowe’s, Dufner sold the business in Marchg to Houston-based an estimated $12 million. H.T.R.’s revenue reachedf $6 million last year, 17 times more than the $350,00p0 the company made when Dufner bought it inDecembert 1999. A decade ago, the business recycled about 30,000 fluoresceng bulbs a month to keep hazardous mercuryh out of landfills andwater supplies.
That number reachedd about 18 million bulbs a year by the time of the Dufner andRaymond Kohout, his minority partnerr and chief operating officer, decided they needed to eithefr invest a large amount of capitak to open additional recyclinhg facilities or find a strategic partne r or buyer for their business. Dufne r turned to lifelong friend James Stuart of in Stuart reached out to contacts at Waste and after about a year of he helpedbroker H.T.R.’s sale. Dufnetr estimated fluorescent bulb recycling isa $100 million to $150 millioh industry.
Analyst Michael Hoffman of in Baltimore noted that garbag disposal isa $52 billion industr y and medical waste disposal accountsa for another $3 billiob to $4 billion. Add-on services such as recyclinf can help a company win additionalmarkett share. “One of Wastw Management’s core goals is to grow its medical waste business toabouft $300 million in revenue in the next 24 months,” Hoffman “Now they can walk into health-carw facilities and hospitals and offer to dispose of theitr medical waste, regular trash and also their fluorescentr bulbs, which for a hospital is no small Waste Management, North America’s largest waste disposa company, posted net income of $1.
09 billioj on revenue of $13.4 billion last year and employz about 46,000. Dufner, 54, grew up in Granitd City and St. Louis, attending and at Carbondale. In 1991, he boughtt one of the first franchises ofEarth City-basee Dent Wizard, a company that provides paintlessw dent removal for automobiles. Dufner moved to Atlanta to run his territoru of Georgiaand Alabama. But in Atlanta-based acquired Dent Wizard and proceeded to buy out its Dufner sold his business forabout $5 and at age 45 found himself lookinh for a new In 1999, while at the Lake of the Dufner struck up a conversation with an employere of H.T.R.
, a three-year-old companty then based in the small town of Golden City in southwest A new federal law regulating the managemen t of waste containing hazardous materials such as mercurg had just gone into effect, but H.T.R.’x 14 investors were short on funds to take advantaged of potential growth. Dufner boughr them out “for a very low price” and took over the businesx as president. Dufner recruited a friend who owned a gun storsin St.
Louis and was familiaf with dealing withgovernmenyt regulators, to help run the business and expand its service area They invested in some tractor-trailersx and started picking up burned-out fluorescenft bulbs from all over the country and haulintg them back to Missouri for processing. Over the next few they relocated the plant to its current location in Kaiser, Mo., near Lake As Dufner improved customer service and the speefd of waste pickup using third-party freight companies, business Beginning in 2003, H.T.R. secured contractes with Wal-Mart to pick up and recycls used bulbs.
Other large retailers, several colleges and universities, and states such as Iowa and Missourii also signed upwith H.T.R. All of the materiao in the bulbs H.T.R. picked up mercury, metal and glass — was None went to landfills. But with the Dufner and Kohout also found themselvesd facinga decision: Expand to keep up with increasingy volume, or find someonee who could do so for them. “The right way to do it would be to build two morerecycling plants, one on the West Coast and one on the East to cut transportation distances and freighy costs,” Dufner said. “Ray and I can’t be in three places at one time.
It was going to requirde a lot more capital to open two new facilitiesx and managethem properly.” So Dufner, who has childrenb ages 3 and 5 with his Renee, decided to look for a buyerr last year and eventually struck the deal with Waste “We thought H.T.R. would make a good fit for saidRick Cochrane, senior business directoer for Waste Management’s WM Lamptracker division. “Over 70 percent of fluorescent lightinyg in the countrystill isn’t recycled properly, and that’s where we thinkm the upside is.” The and many states are targeting a fluorescent recycling goal of about 75 percent, Kohoutt said.
Some 800 million fluorescent lamps burn out each and now millions of residential light sockets are also switching from incandescengt to compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Althougb Missouri does not require residentia recyclingof CFLs, many states do, he “The timing was perfect,” said Kohout, who continues to run the formere H.T.R. operations within WM Lamptracker. “We are now the largestr lamp recycler inthe country, and Waste Managementt is really pushing the sustainabilitg and recycling front. We’ve had nine year of double-digit growth, and we’ver just gotten started.
” As for Dufner, he is buildinvg a home in Ladue and has notdecidedf what, if anything, he will do next. “Am I looking for something? Possibly, but not necessarily,” Dufner said. “That’w how H.T.R. happened. I wasn’t reallyy looking and then it fell inmy