Rob Dorinson

By Brian Sodoma

Monday, June 29, 2009 | 12:40 p.m.

Inspiration sometimes comes in the oddest moments; and watching a crew load construction waste into a beat-up pickup truck may very well satisfy the criterion for an oddly timed muse. But that mental snapshot was all it took for Rob Dorinson to launch one of the most important and recognized green businesses in the valley.

It was 1996 and Dorinson, a contractor at the time, was building a custom home for a client. He called a trash hauling company to bring out a bin for the construction waste on his site, and when it came time for the waste to be hauled off, three men arrived and began sorting the material into separate bins: plastics, wood, drywall, etc., before trucking it away. Dorinson bought the waste hauling company’s business assets and later named it Evergreen Recycling. The trucks died shortly after the sale.

Since that time, Dorinson has proudly climbed to the top of the trash heap, and despite some serious hurdles — unregulated and unlicensed recycling waste haulers driving down prices in 2001 and numerous county permitting tangles in the construction of his state-of-the-art materials recovery facility — Dorinson is still as focused as ever on saving the planet one landfill-

diverted construction bin at a time.

“I was fortunate enough to find a purpose in life … and I’m more excited about the future now than I’ve ever been,” said Dorinson. Ever- green diverts from the valley’s landfill between 80 and 90 percent of the 120,000 tons of waste it processes annually, and the Evergreen president always couches those numbers with: “The goal is 100 percent diversion.”

From its hobbled truck beginnings, Evergreen has grown to more than 70 employees today and has annual revenues of $12 million. It is also home to the state’s first materials recovery facility, a 50,000-square-foot sorting site, which has been featured in numerous industry trade journals and is the company’s greatest tool in processing recyclables and reusables that it sends all over the world.

Today, Evergreen has branched out beyond construction cleanup and into commercial recycling, taking on green-conscious businesses looking to offset disposal costs and do their part in the environmental equation. Commercial clients now make up about 50 to 60 percent of Evergreen’s business, Dorinson said.

Industry spokesman

Dorinson quickly learned that growing a business in an emerging industry meant stepping into a leadership role. He has been referred to as the de facto spokesman for the recycling industry and was a founding member of the local chapter of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design in 2003.

“It was really an accident that I met these people. There were 10 or 15 of us who started it,” he said. “We’re still a sponsor today.”

In 2007, he was also the chief presenter for the Southern Nevada Recycling Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations to the county on recycling initiatives and ways to encourage recycling in the community.

Communication

One of Dorinson’s keys to success lies not so much in the salesmanship required to land large contracts such as MGM Mirage’s CityCenter and the Clark County School District’s Northwest Career and Technical Academy and other big commercial jobs, but in the simple art of keeping open communication lines with clients.

As a contractor, Dorinson felt it was important that each of the subcontractors communicated with him. At Evergreen, he is simply treating his customers the same way he always wanted to be treated as a builder. The simple act of following up with a phone call after a bin drop-off is an example, Dorinson says, of delivering a small but important piece of the Evergreen experience.

“Everybody has different needs. And companies that address those individual needs, those are the successful ones. Once you try to standardize that, it becomes problematic for a business. You should never be too big to listen to your customer every single day,” he said.

Dorinson’s commitment to communication met its greatest challenge in 2001, when unlicensed, unregulated recycling companies came into town, dramatically driving prices down for recycling and waste hauling services. Forced to raise rates by a whopping 35 percent to cover costs, the struggling businessman visited each one of his clients personally to break the news. His hope was to retain 70 percent of his customers, but his candor was rewarded when 98 percent of his clients stuck with him.

The future

Today, Dorinson spends a lot of time evaluating “up-processing” — or increasing the value of materials by somehow modifying the waste materials before finding a buyer — opportunities for his company. Dorinson gives the example of extension cords; his company picks up many of them from construction sites. In the past, the cords held little value. But Dorinson recently invested in a machine that strips the coating off the cords to pull the copper from their center. By separating the materials, he is able to get a better return on the material, while also creating something that is in greater demand. As a result of up-processing efforts, Dorinson also is constantly evaluating what he calls “the highest and best use of a commodity.”

“Sometimes you get comfortable with a market you’re selling to. (But) it may be better to up-process material and find a different market,” Dorinson said, while discussing how market needs shift constantly. “I still feel those high petroleum content products, like plastic bags, will always have value in the marketplace. It just means we may need to present them differently, make it a different form.”

Dorinson also is working with the state of Nevada on potentially creating a woody biomass processing center, where wood can be sorted and processed for various repurposing, such as compost or biomass fuel.

“It’s about taking green to the next level,” he added.

We think that’s something Dorinson already may have accomplished.