Ryan Hickman may be the one of the youngest entrepreneurs to ever live. When he was three and a half years old, he took a trip with his dad to the local recycling center. When Ryan saw how the recycling of old bottles and plastic worked, he immediately fell in love. The idea of helping the environment by repurposing used materials was fascinating to him. Just after this escapade, he founded and became the CEO of his own recycling company: Ryan’s Recycling. After several years of hard work, he caught the attention of celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres and Jennifer Aniston. Ryan explained his business during these interviews, which had consisted of him and his dad driving around Orange County collecting recyclable goods from locals. In the ten years that Ryan and his father have run Ryans recycling, they have collected and recycled 1.6 million cans and bottles. In the beginning, Ryan said he was primarily running his company as a for-profit in the beginning, but over time his business model changed. When he was 6, he started seeing his business as a way to also help the environment in addition to making money from it. This environmental aspect drove Ryan to work even harder in this endeavor. On the money side of things, Ryan is just as responsible. The pay he receives all goes into his college fund. As for college, he hopes to stay local so he can also work on building his recycling business. As the years have passed, Ryan has branched out into the nonprofit scene. In 2020, he founded Project 3R, which was created as a nonprofit to boost environmental education and awareness. In addition to his thriving nonprofit, Ryan also helps out other environmental-oriented businesses. All the money Ryan makes from selling company t-shirts he donates to the pacific marine mammal center in Laguna Beach to assist in the rescuing and rehabilitation of injured sea lions. Ryan is certainly an entrepreneur, and a thoughtful one at that.