If there’s one thing that never seems to change, it’s the waste disposal business. It’s pretty much the way it’s always been: you have something you don’t want, you call a company, and a truck comes to haul it away.
A little more than a year ago, Greg Lettieri, Adam Pasquale, and the team at Recycle Track Systems decided to bring the industry into the 21st century.
How does RTS do it? Two ways, actually. They’ve brought in the same cutting-edge technology that has revolutionized other industries. And they’ve added services that set them apart from traditional companies.
With the company’s mobile app, new and existing customers don’t have to guess when a truck will arrive or whether a pickup has been completed. They monitor the whole process online.
“It’s as easy as ordering delivery from Seamless or GrubHub,” says Lettieri, the company’s CEO.
In the company’s home base of New York, RTS works with companies like the Four Seasons, Shake Shack, and several locations for WeWork. RTS has already expanded to Virginia and the District of Columbia.
Another big client is Whole Foods, which takes advantage of another one of the company’s new services: composting organic waste.
“Our niche, and what separates us as a new company, is doing the organic composting,” says Lettieri. “It makes a big difference. For Whole Foods, that’s 40,000 pound of waste every month that’s not going into landfills.”
Letteri has a background at Bank of America, where he was building technology platforms. Pasquale, the company’s COO, is the fourth generation of his family in waste recycling.
“Adam has relationships with just about everyone you can name,” says Lettieri. “They know that he knows the business. We never had that meeting where someone said, ‘So, what do you kids know?’”
The partners took a two-person office in New York’s WeWork Gramercy space. The company has grown quickly over the last 14 months, expanding into two more offices (and considering a third). In addition, they have plans to move into Philadelphia’s WeWork Northern Liberties when it opens in June. They’ve also been eyeing a space in Brooklyn’s WeWork Dumbo Heights.
Lettieri says that the company’s forward-thinking attitude has helped it to find the right team.
“Traditional waste companies are not able to recruit top talent,” says Lettieri. “But we are. One person on our staff previously worked at NASA, and another one is a graduate at Oxford.”
And he added that working from a WeWork space has helped separate his company from the competition.
“When people meet with us in our WeWork office, they notice immediately that the vibe is energetic and young,” says Lettieri. “The energy around the office is amazing.”
– Mark Sullivan | WeWork