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Waste management companies may be seen negatively as “garbage collectors,” but Karen Coley is radically changing that view. She was responsible for banding together 20 businesses in an industrial corridor to switch over to solar panels, saving money and energy. This was a huge project in the village of Broadview, on the outskirts of Chicago.
Coley, founder and CEO of SBC Waste Solutions, is an ideas person. Noticing the assemblage of these industries in a small area, she realized it made good business sense for the owners to take charge of their own power needs. It would also be environmentally sound.
“It was Karen’s idea to go to the mayor and say, ‘Hey, what if we all went solar down this corridor?’” says Shawn Flood of SBC Waste Solutions. “And they came up with this idea of an initiative. And once we started going, all the businesses wrote letters, and started having meetings about ‘Let’s all become solar together,’ and made it the first solar corridor in Illinois anywhere.”
Chicago has long been a leader in sustainability. In 2014, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced the Vote Solar Initiative, which has been a critical part of economic development in Chicago, while giving more choices to residents and businesses for their energy and other sustainability needs.
SBC Waste Solutions, of which Coley is majority owner, isn’t her first business. Earlier in her career, Coley realized her boss didn’t appreciate her skills and expertise, so she left and started an event-planning company. This was very successful until COVID-19 shut down all events throughout the world. Undeterred, Coley started a waste management company. And to call it simply “garbage collectors,” leaves out so much of what her company does.
“We do a lot of recycling. We have trucks just literally that go around and just pick up recycling. Half of our fleet does recycling,” Flood says. “We promote that with many of our customers who do separate containers. And now we’re at a point now, financially, that we’re actually looking to start developing our own automated recycling facility, which will be automated with robots and other technology. We’ll start taking all our waste and recycling to our own facility and process it ourselves, instead of paying someone else for processing.”
Besides the commingled recycling facility, SBC Waste Solutions is looking at possibly opening up a construction and demolition facility soon. Flood says the need is there, and that’s the sort of thing Coley is always looking for, something to benefit the community as well as make money.
SBC Waste Solutions earned its Woman-Owned Business Enterprise certification, thanks to other influential women in Chicago, who were excited and proud of a woman moving into such a male-dominated market. The WBE is awarded to businesses that are at least 51% owned, operated, and controlled on a daily basis by one or more women, who also have to be American citizens.
While there are plenty of women working at SBC Waste Solutions, Coley is still looking to hire more, but Flood points out an issue unique to the business of residential waste collection that’s slowing down this goal.
“You know, for being on a garbage truck, we don’t get a lot of women applying for those jobs,”
he says with a chuckle.
Still, Coley is not one to accept defeat, so she hasn’t given up on the hiring process. The streets of Chicagoland may soon be full of garbagewomen in overalls, emptying full trash cans into large trucks. Wait and see.
