Beefing up the BigBelly business

You’ve probably seen them around Needham: Two sulking metallic boxes, the apparent lovechild of a Dumpster and a mailbox. Town officials appreciate them because they keep streets clean and save time, even if they’re not much to look at.

“My concern is that somebody could mistake it for a FedEx box or something like that,” said Rhian Hoyland, superintendent for the highway division of Needham Department of Public Works.

The high-tech trashcans are among hundreds produced by Needham-based Seahorse Power Company and shipped to street corners as near as Newton and as far away as the Middle East and Australia. Three years after founder Jim Poss built the world’s only curbside solar-powered trash compactor from scratch, his company is about to launch a slimmer, sexier BigBelly.

“This is not just a receptacle,” Bruce Todtfeld, vice president of marketing, said as he stood beside the newest generation. “It’s a more efficient system of municipal garbage collection.”

By automatically compacting using a solar-powered ram, the BigBelly keeps sidewalks clear of overflowing litter and reduces the number of trips municipal workers have to make to empty the curbside cans. The machine requires no electricity and little maintenance, and has a mailbox-like lid that keeps pests and human hands alike out of the trash compactor.

It also comes with a hefty price tag: $3,600 to $3,900 for the old model, or $3,600 to $4,200 for the new one.

Needham bought one machine in 2005 and a second last year using DPW funds. With only two machines, Hoyland said he hasn’t seen a huge savings in time and money, but has noticed that the town’s BigBelly trash compactors help keep the sidewalk clean and pests out.

“Is it saving time and money, and would it? Absolutely.” He said. “We just don’t have the full analysis because we don’t wait until its full.”

The BigBelly has also won fans in Newton, which owns five.

“We got them just about a year ago and we have not had a problem with a single one in the whole year,” said Dave Mandatori, superintendent of Newton Parks and Recreation. “They’ve pretty much been a big hit everywhere we put them.”

The BigBelly, which holds four to five times as much garbage as a traditional trash can, can help reduce emissions from diesel-powered garbage trucks used to collect curbside garbage.

“You’re sending a really inefficient vehicle to pick that up,” said Todtfeld. With the BigBelly compactors, “instead of picking up something four or five times, you’re picking it up once.”

According to green-energy advocacy group Inform Inc., the typical municipal garbage truck gets less than 3 miles per gallon. In all, American garbage trucks use more than 1 billion gallons of diesel gasoline a year, or 20 million gallons a week.

The BigBelly also collects compacted trash in an inner plastic bin, so it doesn’t need a plastic bag. Its solar panels can operate in ambient light, such as on a cloudy day.

Poss said the BigBelly has also stood up well to the rough life of the streets. Maintaining the machines costs, on average, $5.50 per unit, per year, including vandalism.

“We’ve had them hit by buses, but it’s rare,” Poss said. “We have a very small graveyard.”

But the BigBelly does have an environmental downside: Its lead acid battery, similar to those used by a car engine, must be replaced after about four years. Old batteries, however, are easily recycled.

Before he made garbage cans for a living, Poss worked as a car-part salesman who dealt with components for electric cars. A budding inventor who had been “bitten by the environmental bug,” Poss had a growing interest in the technology used to power a car with sunlight.

It was while working as a car-part salesman that Poss took a particular Saturday-morning stroll among the overflowing garbage cans of Boston’s Charles Street.

“I was thinking, this is ridiculous, there’s litter all over the place,” he said.

Poss began thinking how a new machine might better manage the trash, applying his understanding of the solar technology he used at work. But his concept for a solar-powered trash compactor was initially lost among his other ideas for green-minded inventions, including a machine that would generate electricity from the movement of the ocean. (The invention, which would generate “horse power” from the sea, gave birth to his company’s name: Seahorse Power Co. “Big Belly” is actually a species of sea horse.)

Eventually, Poss decided it was time to act on his vision for the BigBelly.

“I thought, this is it,” he said. “This is definitely an opportunity.”

In the spring of 2004, Poss got his first order from Vail Ski Resort, Colo., which had to send snowmobiles long distances to collect garbage from its slope-side trashcans. Poss built the machine from scratch and sent it off to the mountains.

“It was a one of a kind,” he said. “We’ll never make it like that again.”

The next year, Poss sold 65 BigBelly compactors, including 45 to Queens, N.Y. In 2006, the company sold about 250 machines. This year, as the company prepares to launch a next-generation BigBelly, Poss has set his goal at 750 units. “And we’re on track to beat that,” he said.

Seahorse Power Co. moved into its first office last June, settling into a small building tucked into a side street off Highland Avenue near the Newton border. The office is now home to 12 full-time employees.

“Before that, it was just me and my car and my porch and my kitchen,” Poss said. “I took pictures of trash cans on my honeymoon.”

Poss became familiar with the Needham area long before he moved his company here. The Marblehead native earned his master’s degree in business from Babson College in Wellesley, and worked with students at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham as he was getting his company off the ground.

He said he choose the town as his headquarters partly because its conveniently located and close to suppliers, but also because of his fondness for the town.

“We love Needham,” he said. “In general, it’s just a nice town.”

While most large orders have come from cities like Boston or New York, Poss said even smaller towns like Needham will find a use for the BigBelly.

“They work best in high volume areas,” he said. “And most communities have areas with high trash flow.”

In these high-flow areas, Poss said towns can expect the machines to pay for themselves in one to three years.

“But we’ve seen it in a matter of months,” Poss said. “That’s a tremendous payback.”

A slimmer, more rounded BigBelly will replace its boxy predecessor, which could reasonably be mistaken for an oversized mailbox, starting sometime next month. The new model, which has more of the shape of a traditional trashcan, also features rounded side panels made from recycled plastic.

“This is our Hummer,” Todtfeld said, gesturing to an early model BigBelly, “and this is more like our BMW right here.”

The new BigBelly is already in testing, with 10 models arranged along Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. The machines will go into commercial production in the next month.

In addition, Poss said he is looking into a Dumpster-sized commercial BigBelly and a wireless add-on that would tell municipal workers when the BigBelly needs to be emptied. He expects his company, which he launched in spring 2003, will become profitable by 2008.

The Big Belly brought in sales of about $1 million last year. “We’ll see about this year,” Poss said, “but we’re already past that now.”

Neal Simpson can be reached at nsimpson@cnc