Climbing to the top

With a nearly 100-year history serving California’s San Francisco Bay Area, Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery (MDRR) has been at the forefront of advancements in waste collection and processing to maximize diversion and meet the needs of its customers.

The company’s founders—the Garaventa family—began operating a one-horse and buggy collection service for Concord, California, in the 1930s, which planted the seeds for the continued growth MDRR would achieve over the past century.

Today, the company serves roughly 300,000 residents across five jurisdictions, including Concord, where MDRR’s headquarters remain; Pittsburg; Oakley; and portions of Contra Costa and Solano counties.

“It’s a diverse area—residential, commercial, industrial—it’s kind of a blend of … suburban with a couple of intense urban areas, particularly in Concord [and] in Pittsburg, but also some real rural territories,” says Kish Rajan, CEO of MDRR.

Rajan, who joined the company as chief administrative officer in 2018 before being promoted to CEO in January 2023, says MDRR has undergone quite a transformation since its inception.

The construction of its first transfer station and material recovery facility (MRF) in the 1990s was a major inflection point for the company’s expansion into new service areas such as Pittsburg. The site, originally known as the Mt. Diablo Recycling Center and Transfer Station, soon became the core venue for inbound collection trucks and self-haul operations.

By the mid-2000s, MDRR made its first major investment in the MRF and, in 2020, the facility underwent a massive overhaul. This upgrade included new screens, belt conveyors and optical sorters, Rajan says.

In addition to the MRF, which also accepts construction and demolition (C&D) debris, the 40-acre industrial park is home to an organics processing facility.

In Concord, adjacent to the company’s headquarters, is another industrial area with a truck yard and a mechanic shop, which service roughly half of MDRR’s 100-truck collection fleet. The remaining trucks are located and serviced at a recently acquired property in Antioch, just east of Pittsburg.

While the company has prioritized vertical integration, it doesn’t have a landfill.

“Because we don’t own a landfill, we are highly oriented toward diversion of all kinds,” Rajan says. “That’s a big part of how our operations are structured but also who we are philosophically as a company. We’ve always had a lean toward buying into and supporting regulatory mandates and … guidance that is driving our industry toward greater and greater diversion.”

Photo by Jim Fidelibus

An eye on the future

This future-forward approach is what ultimately led to the Garaventa family taking a step back and bringing on new team members to help enhance business strategies and identify emerging markets.

“Before 2018, the business was always run by family members,” Rajan says. “As the Garaventas started looking to the future and thinking about how to help evolve and keep the company at the forefront of the industry, they made an important decision, which was to continue to be the owners of the company but to bring in new people to run it going forward.”

Rajan was part of this group, alongside industry veteran Ron Proto, who assumed the role of CEO in 2018. With previous experience at waste management firms such as Houston-based WM and Recology in San Francisco, Proto served as a mentor to Rajan as he learned the industry. Proto retired from MDRR last January, and Rajan succeeded him.

Although Rajan had never previously worked in the waste sector, his unique background brought new ideas and innovation to MDRR.

Rajan, a California native, received a bachelor’s in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a juris doctor from Golden Gate University’s School of Law. His first job out of college was as a legislative aid to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

“I’ve always been a political and a policy … I guess ‘nerd’ is a good phrase for it,” he says. “I loved working on Capitol Hill and was enamored by that and stayed very connected to the public sector, but I also loved business, especially within the context of innovation and technology.”

Photo by Jim Fidelibus

In the early to mid-1990s, Rajan worked for various hardware and software service companies in the mobile phone industry. He spent almost 14 years in sales and business development roles and says this part of his career is where he “grew up from a business perspective.”

“My approach to business is you have to innovate, you have to challenge yourselves to set big goals and audacious goals, you have to constantly look to the future,” he says. “And you have to be courageous about taking the right risks and then be able to inspire the people around you to understand the idea and collaborate around something that is pushing us outside of our collective comfort zone.”

During his time at companies like Sprint and SanDisk, Rajan never abandoned his interests in government and politics. In 2008, he was elected to his local city council in Walnut Creek. When his term concluded in 2012, he joined former Gov. Jerry Brown’s team as director of the recently formed Governer’s Office of Business and Economic Development.

In this role, he focused on efforts to make California’s economy and business climate stronger, more attractive and robust.

Building upon tradition

Rajan describes his appointment as MDRR’s chief administrative officer as a “right people at the right moment” situation, adding that he’s seeing more professionals from outside of the waste industry express an interest in it.

“I think when you look around the industry, you’re seeing the influx of people from other backgrounds bringing in new ideas and perspectives,” he says.

While Rajan sees benefits to bringing in new outlooks and perspectives, he is cautious in his ambitions.

“Our company has been so successful, so stable. We have a wonderful tradition and history; we have such a long-tenured staff that have proven for so long how effective they are at these operations,” he says. “That has been critical for me to make sure everyone understands … we don’t want to fix things that aren’t broken.”

Over the past few years, MDRR has pursued plans to enhance several of its current facilities while also looking to adopt new diversion technologies. The newly envisioned campus will be called the Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery Park (MDRRP).

These plans include the deployment of robotic sorters at the company’s MRF early this year, upgrades to its C&D processing and organics operations and, potentially, the addition of anaerobic digestion (AD) technology at a new facility.

In 2020, MDRR received a permit from the city of Pittsburg to construct the four new structures and a building addition totaling 67,405 square feet.

“The core of our operations consists of our transfer station, our MRF and our processing in Pittsburg,” Rajan says of MDRR’s facilities. “We’re only currently using about 18 of those [40 acres], maybe 20. … We have, however, a local development agreement with the city of Pittsburg that gives us a 20-year timeline where we have secured local land-use entitlements to build all kinds of additional facilities.”

Of the company’s several initiatives, its organics diversion has been the most pressing. Since S.B. 1383, or California’s Short-Lived Climate Pollutant Reduction Strategy, went into effect in 2022, Rajan says many jurisdictions have transitioned from biweekly organics collections to weekly, necessitating more trucks, drivers and community outreach, as well as processing space.

“We had a collection system in place … and we had a processing system in place for handling organic material. But now that the law is pushing us toward the 50 percent diversion threshold, and then, in 2025, a 75 percent organic material diversion threshold, we’re stepping up our operations to meet those mandates,” Rajan says.

Last year, MDRR broke ground on a 90,000-square-foot organics processing facility at MDRRP to help residents and businesses comply with S.B. 1383. The company’s prior system, primarily designed for yard waste, mostly involved a basic grinder. Ground material would then be shipped off-site to a third-party composter.

The new system, which the company is working to deploy soon, will include a more robust screening process to better remove contaminants, such as plastic and other nonorganic materials.

“We’re working with a couple of different partners to deploy systems that can create both a solid and potentially also a slurry that can help feed … better composting outcomes,” Rajan says. “But we’re also going to be producing a product that could be used for either anaerobic digestion or mixed with other material that can be used for extracting fuel value out of the organic material.

“The building is already under construction, and certainly the intention is to ensure that what we create will provide the flexibility and versatility we need to ensure we transform as much organic material as we can into useful products,” he adds.

Photo courtesy of Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery

Working together

To make these advancements possible, Rajan says good relationships with MDRR’s jurisdictions have been essential. To be in full compliance with S.B. 1383, the company expressed the need for enhanced facilities, equipment and processes and the capital to make it all happen.

“We partnered with our jurisdictions to build out the idea, to build out the budget and then for the financing of that to happen through the rates,” he says. “So, our ratepayers are helping us to invest in these systems that will benefit our whole community.”

Because of this, Rajan says he is obligated to ensure plans are cost-effective, environmentally friendly and maximize return on investment.

New legislation on the horizon that will affect MDRR and other waste haulers is California’s Advanced Clean Fleets Regulation, which aims to accelerate the market for zero-emission trucks, vans and buses.

For MDRR, a company with a fleet of roughly 140 collection trucks, long-haul trucks and support vehicles, a move toward 100 percent-zero-emission vehicles by 2042 will be a massive undertaking.

“I love California, and I believe in the goals and the values that are the underpinnings of these laws, but there’s a real tension between the environmental objectives and the economic realities. And in our case, not only that but [also] the operational realities,” he says. “So, there’s going to be a lot of give and take for us to achieve full implementation of this zero-emission rule.”

Regardless, Rajan says he and his team are planning for new construction at MDRR and are working with utilities to develop on-site power options, such as gasification and hydrogen fuel cell electric, as well as charging infrastructure.

“The good news is, for us, that we’ve got the real estate, we’ve got the local permits and we’re working with the state of California to get the solid waste facility permit updated to accommodate more inbound tonnage capacity and to allow for these different types of technologies that I’m describing,” he says. “So, I would like to say the trajectory of our company overall is very exciting.

“We have the building blocks and a game plan in place to keep evolving into one of the leaders in this industry. And that’s the vision; that’s what we’re working on,” Rajan adds.

The author is associate editor of Waste Today and can be reached at hrischar@gie.net.