Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! This has been Ryan Hickman’s motto since he was three years old. For most three-year-olds, it’s hard enough to throw things away without help from your parents, but for Ryan, recycling is something he’s always loved to do! His love for recycling grew even more when he discovered that he could make money from doing it! Talk about loving what you do for a living! He took a big bag of recyclables from his house to the local recycling center, and they gave him five dollars for the things he brought. Because he was young, Ryan believed that with those five dollars, he had won the lottery. He got to make money for doing something he already loved, so it’s fair to say he certainly did hit the jackpot!

Not too long after the visit to the local recycling center, Ryan’s Recycling was born. He started going around to the houses in his neighborhood to collect other people’s recycling and bring it to the center. Ryan is now eleven years old and is the CEO of Ryan’s Recycling. He has company merchandise and his face is plastered on the side of a few vans he uses to transport loads! Obviously Ryan does not work alone, and his dad is the chauffeur behind the recycling celebrity. Ryan and his dad spend most of their weekends traveling around Orange County, California collecting recyclables. They’ve spent years building up a real client base. People trust that Ryan will actually take their items to a recycling plant and it will get reused instead of thrown into a trash facility.

Ryan’s business tugs on the heart strings of everyone around him. He shows people why it’s important to care about recycling by emphasizing that his business isn’t about the money, but it’s about the earth. At first he was too young to know that the earth can be damaged by trash, but over the years he grew to love the green movement and be a front line protector of the earth. Ryan’s Recycling has been around for not even a decade, and they have already recycled over 1.6 million plastic bottles and cans – and that’s just their local area. Ryan, like a good entrepreneur, has earned money and invested it straight into his future. He plans to go The University of California, Irvine so that he can remain local and keep his business running while furthering his education.

Along with his for-profit recycling company, Ryan also started “Project 3R” – a non-profit organization that takes donations to Ryan’s Recycling and uses them to fund community and beach clean ups, and to help make his community more aware of their effects on the environment.