🌐 The Largest Private Recycling Company in America Just Showed

We know the challenges recycling has faced from our personal experience: it can be confusing to comply and take too much effort to clean and sort.

But there's another problem on the other side of that equation. Many of the companies that run recycling facilities make their money from landfills.

And if your business depends on filling landfills, recycling is rarely the business priority. It may be a service customers want. It may be a business line. But it is not the center of gravity.

Ron Gonen built Circular Services around the opposite premise.

For five years, his team quietly bought up recycling and composting companies across the United States. No splashy announcements. No victory laps. Just acquisition by acquisition, facility by facility, contract by contract.

Then Circular Services emerged from stealth as the largest privately held recycling and composting company in America.

Today: 35 facilities. Major municipal contracts in New York, Charlotte, Austin, San Antonio, and Phoenix. Operations across seven of the ten largest U.S. cities.

The reaction from the waste services industry: wait, they did what?

Circular Services was built to avoid the structural conflict between recycling more material and making money from landfills.

Ron has been treating waste as an economic transaction since he co-founded RecycleBank more than two decades ago. Cities paid. Households earned. The behavior scaled.

He later served as Mayor Bloomberg’s Recycling Czar in New York City. You can hear him talk about it with Alec Baldwin on Baldwin’s podcast, Here’s The Thing.

He authored The Waste-Free World.

Then he founded Closed Loop Partners around a core idea: the circular economy needs new materials and technologies, but that’s not enough. It also needs capital, know-how, and infrastructure. Closed Loop Partners was built to provide what’s been missing.

🏦 A capital management arm with an early-stage venture fund, a mid-market private equity fund, and a credit fund. 

The venture fund alone has made 30+ investments, including in SolarCycle (episode 65) to recycle solar panels and Mori, commercializing a silk-based and edible coating that extends the shelf life of fresh food and reduces food spoilage and waste

🔄 The Center for the Circular Economy, an advisory practice that works with major corporations to redesign supply chains away from extraction and toward reuse. Clients include L’Oréal, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald's, Target, Dollar Tree, and many more.

🏭 Circular Services, the physical infrastructure that actually processes the material and returns it as raw input.

I first met Ron when he was running RecycleBank and was a frequent guest on The Lazy Environmentalist radio show. Later, after the radio show became a TV show and then ended in 2010, I reached out to Ron for advice. I was burned out and had no idea what to do next.

His advice: go back into the startup world and learn on someone else’s dime. I took it, and it made a huge difference in how my own career has turned out.

Here’s what stood out from our conversation.

The recycling industry had a structural conflict of interest.

“The service has been dominated by companies that are predominantly in the waste business — picking up garbage and putting it in their landfill. As long as that was the case, recycling would always be limited, because the majority of their market cap was based on feeding the landfill.”

This is the simplest explanation for why recycling has so often failed to live up to its promise. Circular Services was built without that conflict.

Five years of silence was the strategy.

“The reaction of the industry was, oh, whoa, wait a second. Wait, they did what? They just took all — wait, did they just become the largest privately held recycling company? And that was intentional, because we felt like if we started broadcasting our strategy, competitors would do different things to block our ability to do that.”

The old supply chain pitch would get you thrown out of the room.

“If somebody walked into an investor meeting today and said, I got an idea for you about a supply chain — we’re going to go to some emerging market country, extract the natural resource out of there, it’s politically unstable but don’t worry, we’re going to ship it to another country, turn it into a pellet, ship it over here — the reaction would probably be, have you been in a coma for the last five or six years?”

The global supply chains built over the last sixty years made sense under a specific set of conditions: cheap labor, extraction, and transportation. Limited visibility and little accountability for events far from the end customer.

Those conditions are gone.

The circular economy needs the whole stack.

“My interest in building Closed Loop Partners wasn’t to be an asset manager or infrastructure fund or a venture fund. It was to build a company that builds out circular economy infrastructure and solutions.”

This is what makes Closed Loop Partners unusual. It is not organized around one financial lane. It is organized around a market problem.

I don’t care about your product.

“I’m going to be very direct. I don’t care about your product. I care about what your customer thinks about your product. All that matters is: is it reliable? Is it well-priced? Does it give them the comfort, the status, the emotion that they’re seeking?”

Climate founders often lead with the breakthrough. Ron is saying the breakthrough is not the business. The business is whether the customer finds it reliable, useful, well-priced, and worth switching to. Those are the types of ventures Closed Loop Partners backs.

Your real market is not the sustainability buyer.

“That mom who is from the reddest of red states — who would strip Al Gore of his US citizenship if she could — would buy that Seventh Generation product because it was good for her kids. And all of a sudden, the TAM for Seventh Generation and Method became massive.”

A sustainability product stays small when it only sells to people who already identify as sustainability customers. It gets big when it solves a mainstream problem better than the incumbent.

Every facility has to work on its own.

“We have 35 facilities today. Every single one of them is profitable on a standalone basis.”

Supercool Takeaway

American recycling was built around a conflict: many of the companies paid to recycle also made money from landfills. Ron Gonen built Closed Loop Partners to remove that conflict and provide what the circular economy has been missing — capital, know-how, and infrastructure that moves waste back into supply chains.

Operator Takeaways

Stay quiet when attention weakens the strategy.
Circular Services did not need the market to understand the roll-up while it was still assembling the assets. It needed the position first.

Lead with the customer’s reason to buy.
Customers do not buy the mission. They buy reliability, price, performance, convenience, and whatever makes the product worth switching for.

Make the economics work asset by asset.
Circular Services has 35 facilities, and every one is profitable on a standalone basis. That is the discipline behind its infrastructure buildout.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

The House That Rice Built: Modern Mill’s Breakthrough Building Material

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

ARTICLE

Boston College: Finding the Solution: How Josh Dorfman Paved His Own Path in Sustainability Media

PODCASTS

Net Zero Compare: Josh Dorfman on Why Climate Solutions Succeed or Fail: Lessons from Josh Dorfman on Business Models, Materials, and Market Adoption

Education on Fire: Climate Solutions Are the Future of Business — and Young People Can Be Part of It

Building Great Tech: The Trick Is to Never Talk About the Environment – Josh Dorfman

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