Starting July 1, 2016, a familiar face returns to East Cobb to launch a new breed of Sanitation Company. His name is Jim. His family came to Cobb in the late seventies and put down roots. Since then, Jim has spent the vast part of his life in waste remediation, and is one of the founders of Robertson Sanitation. Today, Jim is back to stay and has a fire in his belly launching Big Orange Sanitation Services or simply just “BOSS.” He wants to earn your business.

Talk to Jim and you’ll be impressed with his passion for waste remediation and how his new waste company can effect change toward a cleaner future through a partnership with his customers, the residents of Cobb. He believes Cobb County is the smartest place to start changing the world because Cobber’s have shown, time and time again, that they don’t wait for someone else to help them. They organize and do it themselves.

Look around and you’ll agree we have a waste challenge. Our own garbage is killing us. Americans produce over 429 million tons of waste per year. That’s about 1.6 pounds per person, per day! Jim believes garbage doesn’t have to be put in landfills any longer. His long range plan is to collect it…and then convert it to energy. Jim laughs when he says; “The technologies to convert waste into energy has been around since World War II. Our version is simply the cleanest technology available today”.

Processes like the one Jim is excited about recycle everything made of carbon. That’s 95% of everything on the planet. Precious metals are sifted and sold as scrap and cement is made benign. The carbon is reconstructed into clean and useful commodities.

Lofty goals? Not to Jim. He’ll tell you “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. The first step? Bring back customer service and build safer trucks and equipment. Safety means everything to BOSS. He urges customers to think about who’s driving down the street kids play on. He believes the competition has become slow, complacent, lazy and unsafe! Jim thinks this is unsatisfactory. He’s going to change that again like he did once before in his early days when he asked the majors why the equipment was so unreliable? The answer was “this is how it is.” “Nonsense”, says Jim. “In aerospace, if Delta can fly an airplane 15 hours a day for 20 years, with no breakdowns, so can the waste industry. This is not rocket science. It’s just a truck!”

He’s out to change that. He expressed his concerns to major truck makers. He asked if they could build a more reliable truck. The answer was; “Why should we do that? We sell as many trucks as we can build!” Jim thought this was nonsense. Freightliner took interest. Only six months later, the first Freightliner FL-70 refuse truck was born and ready for field testing in East Cobb by Roberson. Eight years later, the FL-70 was the number one selling residential refuge truck in the country. The hardest part in building the prototype was not the anti-lock brakes and traction control. You can thank the aerospace industry for that. Amazingly it was something simple…like turning radius. The challenge? Ah! Get the truck to turn around in an East Cobb cul-de-sac without backing up!

Another challenge was installing the engine in the truck so that the hood would be sloped enough for the driver to easily see a young child in front of the truck. Today, due in no small part to Jim, these are standard features on school buses today. This was 1990, Freightliner built it. Today, Jim will apply all of that to Big Orange. Boss equipment will be safer, cleaner and more fuel efficient.

Today, Jim is again teaming with Freightliner to develop new safety technology that only BOSS will have. That takes care of equipment and safety. Regarding service, Jim’s people will be in uniform, trained to be kind, courteous and go the extra mile with service. Jim realizes people have a choice in who they choose in a subscription market.

Boss’s goal is to impress customers with a quality of service they haven’t seen in years. Jim says; “there is no reason why people have to put up with poor attitudes, poor equipment and poor service. I’m going to change that and set an example. He hopes you’ll join him.

For more information on Big Orange Sanitation Services (BOSS), call 770-693-5777.

Reprinted from EAST COBBER’s June/July 2016 issue

 

What are your thoughts on converting waste into energy? Please comment below!