Sampson's firm, Niche Recycling Inc., was incorporated in 1995 to administer the program for Anheuser-Busch, charging bar owners $100 a month for a crusher, training, and glass removal. Each crusher could reduce a bar's waste 78 percent, or by a trash bin's worth for every 30 cases of beer.
When Anheuser-Busch bowed out, Sampson said, he could not put together the financing to buy enough crushers - he figured he needed 200 - for a bottle-smashing venture of his own.
"Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground," Sampson said matter-of-factly last week, quoting a James Taylor song.
But he has gotten over it. He thinks he is onto something way bigger. And so, it seems, do some of the city's green-technology advocates.
On Oct. 28, Mayor Nutter announced that an $18,500 grant - one of three awarded under the Greenworks Pilot Energy Technology Program (G-PET) - would go to another Sampson entity, Niche Waste Reduction & Recycling Systems Inc.
The funding is intended to help Sampson and his partners modify a unique composting trash bin developed in Australia to meet U.S. regulatory requirements, said Jim Gambino, who heads energy and strategy programs for Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a G-PET sponsor along with the city and Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp.
"It really engenders energy efficiency and the reduction of greenhouse gases," Gambino said, explaining why the project won funding.
The usually loquacious Sampson was unwilling to say too much about his latest trash obsession in an interview last week. He said he did not want others ripping off the idea before he and his associates had a chance to perfect their product and get it on the U.S. market.
