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Margie Powell's two daughters are proud of their mom and especially like the fact that she's environmentally friendly. But they aren't necessarily thrilled with the way she's gone about cleaning up.
"I think they think I should have something easier to do," said Powell, who started a garbage-collecting business about a year ago.
Powell's Cowgirl Collection Co. offers curbside trash and recycling pickup to about 100 rural Grimes County residents.
Powell is the company's only employee. She picks up the trash and stores it in the trailer behind her Dodge pickup before emptying it at the Rock Prairie Landfill. Recylables go in the bed of the truck and are taken to the recycling center at the Walmart in Bryan.
The 48-year-old said things can get messy, but for the most part, her customers are good about keeping their garbage bags sealed. Though she doesn't put a limit on how much trash a client can put out, she said, she hasn't encountered anything too heavy to lift.
A clean start
Powell, who raises longhorns and loves horses -- hence the company's name -- hasn't always been a garbage woman.
She and her family lived in Montgomery, where she raised her daughters and built houses for a living. She moved to a 68-acre ranch in Anderson three years ago seeking a fresh start. She had just gone through a divorce and knew she needed to be able to support herself, she said.
The idea to start a trash-collecting business came when she started noticing the way people treated the land, she said.
"A couple years ago, I spent three weeks picking up litter around my property," she said. "I was so aghast at the way people disposed of trash."
Powell said she saw people dumping trash off bridges and on the side of the road.
The kicker came in September 2008, when Powell and her friends got together to wait out Hurricane Ike. Afterward, she said, there was nowhere to dispose of the trash. She couldn't get anyone to come pick it up, the local disposal sites were closed because of the hurricane and she wasn't yet familiar with the Rock Prairie Landfill. After driving to Houston and spending hours looking for a large trash bin, Powell said, she became frustrated and figured she could solve the problem by providing the service to others.
Powell attached her 16-foot cattle trailer to her truck, purchased some roll-away trash cans and started recruiting customers.
Since she signed up her first client about a year ago, Powell said, the business has grown about 25 to 30 percent each quarter. She charges $25 a month for weekly pickup and has about 100 customers. She wants to reach 200, she said, at which point she hopes to hire an employee.
Signs displaying the Cowgirl Collection Co. logo can be found in front of the homes of those who use her services. She also relies on referrals from customers for new business.
A growing business
Powell isn't the only independent garbage collector in the Brazos Valley.
Samantha Best, superintendent of the Rock Prairie Landfill in College Station, said she knows of about six similar businesses in the area.
"I'd say in the last two or three months, we've seen about four new accounts open that are these type," she said, explaining that she wasn't sure what contributed to the increase. "I think it could have something to do with our rates. We offer consistently low rates."
Best said the landfill charges $25.30 per ton of garbage and prorates the amount for less than a ton.
Larger garbage-collecting businesses, such as Waste Management, also pick up trash for rural residents, but most rural residents bring in their own trash, she said.
"We do have a lot of mom-and-pops that come into the facility," Best said. "They're coming into town to do their shopping, and they just bring their garbage with them. That's primarily what we see on Saturdays."
Residents in rural areas have the option of taking their trash to local disposal sites, said Debbie Stringer, a representative for the county's license and permits department. Stringer said she likes the option of using one of the three designated trash-collection sites. At the cost of $1 per bag, Stringer said she thinks the sites are the cheapest way to get rid of trash.
But Powell said her rates, plus the fact that she offers curbside pickup and recycling, makes her business the better deal.
Going green
Sandra Nobles, executive director of the Navasota-Grimes County Chamber of Commerce, said Cowgirl has been successful, in part, due to the growth in the area and Powell's ability to provide quality customer service.
Beverly Mullins said she switched to Powell's company about six months ago after her other trash collector didn't show up when scheduled.
"Margie's prompt, and she's always here on time," she said. "I feel like she's a friend."
Clint Blair, owner of Clint's, a supermarket in Anderson, began using Powell's recycling service about seven months ago.
The public has become more aware of recycling, Powell said, noting that it took the recycling bin at Clint's a month and a half to fill up initially. Now, she empties it every two weeks.
Powell grew up in Seattle, where people have a different mentality about the environment, she said. Recycling is the norm there, she said, which is why it's a habit she tries to encourage her customers to pick up.
"Recycling needs to be easy, or they're not going to do it. A lot of customers are starting to do it," she said.
About 30 percent of her residential clients recycle, she said, and eight businesses in Anderson use her recycling service.
"Texas is getting greener all the time," she said.
