Recon Mission

RECON MISSION

What happens when you apply guerrilla military tactics learned in Marine Corps Special Operations to recycling? If you’re Richard McCaskill of Recon Recycling, San Diego, business success follows.

McCaskill formed Recon Recycling in 2007 after falling on hard times and filing for bankruptcy. Inspired by the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, McCaskill and his partners reached out to the homeless, scavengers and cart pushers in their San Diego community of Barrio Logan, who taught them the basics of recycling. The budding business owners also studied various recycling businesses as they set out to educate themselves about the industry.

Today, Recon Recycling operates one micro-MRF™ and two buy-back centers in San Diego. McCaskill says, “We recently signed an agreement to provide recycling for the city of Dakar, Senegal, West Africa (population 5 million) and are in the process of customizing a program in Playas de Tijuana, Mexico (population 45,000).”

Recon Recycling’s collection division provides customized recycling collection services for businesses, including materials such as glass, plastics, fiber, metals and electronics.

McCaskill talks about his business with Recycling Today:

Q: What’s the scope of your operation?
A: We are a fully integrated recycling company. Our main location is a micro-MRF, which acts as a hub for our service fee collections, buyback centers and drop-off operation. Currently, we process approximately 2.5 million pounds per year.

Q: What makes you different from your competitors?
A: Our level of service is more intimate, intense and manual. We do the recycling that cannot be done by the single-stream and Dumpster infrastructure. We are a source-separated operation, and so our relationship and daily interaction with our clients has to be very solid.

“Our level of service is more intimate, intense and manual. We do the recycling that cannot be done by the single-stream and Dumpster infrastructure.” – Richard McCaskill