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                   Vietnam Refugee Turns Trash into Treasure

   by Jim Randle

   David Duong's family had to be rescued at sea after fleeing Vietnam in
   a small boat at the end of the war. After time in a refugee camp, they
   arrived in the United States in 1979 with no possessions other than the
   vision to find opportunity where other people could see only trash.
   Now, the family recycling business in California is worth hundreds of
   millions of dollars, employs hundreds of people, and is investing back
   in Vietnam.

   Duong's company, California Waste Solutions, operates in Oakland and
   San Jose, California. It has fleets of specialized trucks that cost
   about $300,000 each that go out at dawn to collect recyclable
   materials. Thousands of tons of material are brought to the company's
   large, complex, highly automated sorting plants.

   It is a huge evolution for a company that began when Duong's new
   immigrant family desperately needed work and money and started picking
   up cardboard on the streets of nearby San Francisco. They sorted
   recyclables out of trash by hand and sold them to be turned into boxes,
   cans and other products.

   ''The 23 members of the Duong family were among the thousands of people
   who fled chaos as the Vietnam war ended. "We almost died in the ocean
   because the engine broke, and we have to be out there the boat just
   floating," says Duong.

   Duong's father scraped together a $700 down payment on a used truck.
   But as a new arrival with no credit history, he had trouble borrowing
   the rest of the money for the truck. David Duong says his dad "Went to
   Chinatown to a Chinese church and asked for help. And people know us
   and they help us ...so we can go around and pick up recyclable material
   and sell, and that's how we started."

   Many machines now do the sorting that Duong's family once did by hand.
   Some machines use magnets or electric charges to sift iron or aluminum
   to separate valuable metals from other materials. Other machines, some
   the size of large rooms, use bright lights, puffs of air and computers
   to separate lightweight material like plastic bags from heavier fiber
   materials.

   ''The noisy process involves numerous lengthy conveyor belts and many
   large, expensive, and complex pieces of equipment. The point of the
   process is to sort a tangled jumble of stuff into relatively pure piles
   of aluminum, paper or certain kinds of plastic to be used as an
   economical raw material for manufacturers.

   It is also good for the environment, according to Chief Operating
   Officer Joel Corona who says the goal is to send "zero waste" to
   California's landfills.

   Back in Vietnam, growing concern for environmental issues presented an
   opportunity for California Waste Solutions to expand. The company has
   been operating modern facilities, built and operated to U.S. standards,
   for some time.

   Duong says Vietnam's government is making it easier to invest there,
   which could encourage some overseas Vietnamese to overcome lingering
   anger and start new ventures in the old country. Duong says "We can
   take the technology that we learned, we do it here in the U.S., bring
   it back to our hometown and be able to help the people of Vietnam and
   help the environment, and those are things I'm just so proud."

   So Duong is exporting more than just 500 kilogram bales of cardboard,
   plastic, or aluminum. He is also sharing the idea that a combination of
   hard work, risk-taking, good luck and bold vision sometimes really pays
   off.
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   [1]http://www.voanews.com/content/vietnamese-refugee-turned-entrepreneu
   r-invests-in-old-country/3339244.html

References

   1. http://www.voanews.com/content/vietnamese-refugee-turned-entrepreneur-invests-in-old-country/3339244.html