Many of the town’s residents pitched in $10 to $100 to become shareholders in the new entity. In 1962 a group of business leaders, including Cremer’s grandfather, decided the southern Minnesota town needed to diversify from its traditional agricultural base. Harmony Enterprises didn’t start out as an environmental company. Just last month, Cremer sold a vertical baler in Surinam. Today about 40 percent of the company’s annual revenue of $10 million to $15 million comes from 57 countries. He called the Minnesota Trade Office for advice, ultimately visited Taiwan to make sure the ordering business was legitimate and negotiated his way to his company’s first international business deal. It was a lucrative order, but he wondered whether he would be paid. It was an order for a baler, a piece of equipment that compresses waste such as cardboard. In 1989, Harmony Enterprises received a document from Taiwan that curled over the lip of the fax machine. But that wouldn’t be the whole picture because, in truth, Cremer’s story is quintessentially Minnesotan - intensely local, but increasingly global. It would be easy to characterize Cremer as a hard-charging entrepreneur eager to capitalize on what is clearly an attractive market opportunity. That means the country could spend about eight times more to manage China’s trash between now and 2020, from about $3.7 billion now to $28 billion. “Management of this waste has enormous domestic and international implications.” “No country has ever experienced as large, or as rapid, an increase in waste generation,” a World Bank report says. China’s trash is a big problem that requires innovative solutions. In 2004, China’s burgeoning urban areas generated about 190 million tons of municipal solid waste, and by 2030, that amount is projected to surge to at least 480 million tons. As its population migrates from rural to urban areas, China recently surpassed the United States as the world’s largest municipal solid waste generator, according to the World Bank. Like in many booming economies, the unfortunate byproduct of China’s growth is trash - mountains of it. On that trip, his goal was to sell his SmartPack trash compactors - otherwise known as the Talking Trash Can - for use during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.īut he was also looking for other opportunities. As president of Harmony Enterprises, Cremer traveled about China last week with the environmental delegation of Gov. The idea behind his products is simple: Compressing trash saves precious space in landfills. Based in the little town of Harmony, Minn., the family-owned company manufactures and distributes compactors and balers for the recycling industry. That’s good news for Cremer’s Harmony Enterprises Inc. “There’s a lot of cardboard here,” he said. Steven Cremer sees piles of plastic pop bottles and other random litter. Others may see the broad boulevards of Beijing, or the expansive skylines of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
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