LJP Enterprises

Photo: Jeff Silker

80-employee St. Peter solid waste and recycling services company offers profitable alternatives to landfill dumping.

In writing To A Mouse, eighteenth century Scots poet Robert Burns penned, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” Perhaps a modern version of expressing this oft-quoted line: A person’s best plans often become fouled up.

And such was Larry Biederman in 1974.

He had stumbled onto “the best job I ever had,” said 62-year-old Biederman in a Connect Business Magazine interview from the St. Peter offices of LJP Enterprises, an 80-employee solid waste and recycling services company serving residential and commercial customers in southern Minnesota. “It was a lot of fun, interesting, and different every day. But after my first year, Gustavus Adolphus College (Biederman’s employer then) instituted a wage freeze that eventually froze me out.”

He had been a biology technician responsible for maintaining college science labs, caring for animals, and managing the campus greenhouse. He absolutely loved his job. He worked eleven months a year and had off a month. But due to the wage freeze, he hadn’t had a single salary increase in 1975-78, which was a period of rising inflationary pressure.

So he had to leave.

“That wage freeze at Gustavus was one of the best things that happened to me in some respects,” he said looking back. “It started me on my career path. I left because I had mouths to feed. My wife and I had just started building a house. And the county job paid more.”

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In 1958 when Larry was 10, the Biederman family abruptly moved from Brainerd to St. Peter out of economic necessity. Larry’s father had been a buttermaker and had injured his back delivering milk for Marigold Dairy. Said Larry, “So my father learned another trade, upholstery. Then my parents sent us kids off to Grandma’s house one day and went looking for a town that needed an upholstery business. They chose St. Peter.”

Quite a transition. Not only did his father have to start a business from scratch without any guarantee of success in a town in which everyone was a stranger, but also Larry and his siblings suddenly had to adjust to a new town, school, church, and neighbors. His parents had wanted to try something different and the drastic move took nerve.
“My parents worked hard all the time and us kids always had to help pulling off fabric and delivering furniture,” said Biederman. “Eventually, in 1970, they both went to work for Gustavus Adolphus full-time to run the college upholstery shop. My mother made draperies for campus.”

That was the same year Biederman graduated from Gustavus Adolphus with a biology degree and the hope of becoming a high school teacher. Back then, a student could work his or her way through college, which Biederman did. He had always been interested in wildlife, was an avid hunter, and enjoyed learning about science. He married his junior year, and, after graduation in 1970, both he and his wife conveniently landed high school teaching positions in Belview, Minnesota, west of Redwood Falls.

“I taught all the sciences and used to tell people I was chairman of the science department,” he laughed. “In fact, I was the entire science department. I was teaching physics with little background in it. I had to take classes to stay ahead of the kids. It was challenging. I often think that if I had to do that experience over I’d do it differently. Our life revolved around the school and other teachers.”

The Biedermans also lived on a farm site where Larry bred and raised geese for Gustavus Adolphus professors doing research for a goose hatchery in Sleepy Eye. He collected eggs in the morning before teaching school and had to maintain elaborate records to track which breeding pairs generated particular goslings. He delivered eggs to the hatchery. Over time, he found himself enjoying working for the Gustavus professors more than teaching.

But before leaving teaching in 1974 for a Gustavus Adolphus job as a biology technician setting up labs and managing the greenhouse, he had acquired valuable teaching skills. For one, he had learned how to “get along with others and find win-win situations.” He took this experience with him to Gustavus Adolphus, which would become his “best job ever,” only to have budget woes create a wage freeze leading to his leaving for purely economic reasons in 1978. This abrupt change eventually jump-started his career.

“In terms of business knowledge, the job that benefited me most was my next one of working for Brown and Nicollet Counties as their environmental health officer,” he said. “I worked for both counties and their cities. I had the opportunity to develop relationships with city and county staffs, did the nuisance complaints, and worked on controversial issues, such as failing septic systems. It was my job to tell people they had to fix their septic systems because of it being a public health threat.”

One project involved helping the City of North Mankato provide sewer and water service to an area of Belgrade Township rife with failed septic systems. On other occasions, he was the court-ordered messenger that had to investigate health complaints in residences.

He said, “I don’t like dealing with conflict, so I liked finding situations that worked for everyone. Again, I like win-win situations. Obviously, if someone has a failing septic system, that’s something they don’t want either. They would be unable to sell their home, so my job was to help them get that system fixed correctly and economically.”

While employed by the two counties into 1987, Biederman had to master complex zoning and environmental rules and regulations. On a daily basis, he had to pull knowledge from his experience of maintaining the microbiology lab at Gustavus Adolphus and of teaching chemistry in Belview.

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Then came a fortuitous turn. The federal Waste Management Act of 1985 passed, said Biederman, setting up a chain of waste disposal that included “reduce, reuse, recycle, compost, waste, energy, and lastly, landfilling.”

He said, “At that point, I thought I was better off being the one regulated than the one doing the regulating. I could see the whole industry was going to change. So in 1985, I picked up a part-time job doing industrial waste approvals for Tellijohn Landfill in Le Sueur. When I took that job, I told owners Tom and Dana Tellijohn I wanted to learn the business.”

In 1987, he left his county job to work full-time for the Tellijohns. They taught Biederman everything from budgeting, billing, and pricing to customer service. In addition to working for them, through them he began a part-time project funded by a grant from Pillsbury, which owned vegetable packer Green Giant. Pillsbury needed a cost-effective way of complying with a new Wisconsin law forbidding the landfilling of canned vegetables. Biederman worked long hours formulating a solution and was well into the patent process in 1992 when the Tellijohns sold their landfill to mega-waste hauler Waste Management. Biederman promptly signed a transition contract with Waste Management through February 1993, after which he began his own business, LJP Enterprises. (The “LJP” stood for the first letter of each of his children’s names: (Lori, Joanne, and Paul) His was a good idea on paper, he thought, but could he make this idea work?

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The NSP power plant in Mankato off Summit Avenue was his first stop. He recalled, “At that time, they were running their plant five days a week and going cold on the weekends. They had started burning refuse-derived fuel at this (Wilmarth) plant in about 1985. I asked if they saw a benefit to them if I could get area cities to bring in their trash to keep their plant going over the weekends. They said yes.”

Biederman had been the Tellijohns’ contact person with cities and counties in the region. “NSP asked me to work with their wholly owned subsidiary, NRG Inc.,” he continued, “and we struck up a 50-50 partnership to get waste from the surrounding area to the Mankato plant. (Recovery Resources Technology is the current 50-50 partner.) During this time, my wife worked to support us. I didn’t have any other income then except what she brought in.”

NRG and Biederman began Minnesota Waste Processing, which contracted with cities to have their residential haulers bring in trash to feed the power plant. A friend and elderly neighbor, Ed Schultz, using Nicollet County Bank as an intermediary, loaned Biederman $300,000 with the sole stipulation Biederman had to repay the loan within a specified time frame in the form of a donation to Gustavus Adolphus College. (He would make the donation before the deadline.) He used that loan to build a 20,000 sq. ft. processing center off Summit Avenue.

Besides Schultz, Biederman could not have kept his company going without the help of friends. Before building his facility, he rented a 30×40 pole barn from SMC. When his truck scale broke, ADM let his trucks use theirs. ADM also loaned him tools to fix a broken shredder. And when his loader failed on Easter weekend? Larry Nurre of Southern Minnesota Construction was there immediately with a replacement.

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“Our main purpose at LJP Enterprises has always been to find fuel for the power plant in Mankato,” said Biederman of a facility creating enough energy today to power more than 2,200 homes. “That’s the base we have built all our companies on.”

By the late ’90s, it became clear the only way he could find more fuel—he already had most of the waste from area cities sewed up through contract—was to sign up industrial accounts. And the only way for him to become price competitive against larger haulers inexpensively trucking waste to out-of-state landfills was to reduce his transportation costs and begin a recycling revenue stream. To that goal, the company soon began operating an 8,000 sq. ft. North Mankato recycling center until its insurance carrier made it stop due to liability issues. Today, the company no longer operates the facility, but does market its sorted material.

Minnesota Waste Processing started delivering waste to the power plant. The power plant charged it a fee to deliver waste for burning and Minnesota Waste Processing made its money by charging customers an amount above its costs.

Said Biederman, “Our job has been to find the best possible uses for all the waste streams a company produces. On the other hand, our competitors often just want to landfill the trash.”

What did he like best about his job? “It’s different every day,” he said. “We also get to work with great companies. I like going through their plants to see how they do things and making suggestions on how our handling their waste can benefit them and how they can become more environmentally sound.”

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Today, LJP Enterprises has more than 80 employees spread over a number of area facilities: a St. Peter truck shop, a trucking company, a garbage collecting company, recycling centers in St. Peter and Le Center, and Minnesota Waste Processing in Mankato.

“It’s hard finding a home for all the recycling markets and we have a good team of people doing it,” he said. “The recycling market has really exploded over the last few years.” That “good team” includes top managers Vickie Michels, Tom Froehlich, and Jesse Samuelson, and Charlie More, who manages a recycling facility.

One creative revenue stream LJP Enterprises developed: the company started taking formerly landfilled food waste, such as eggs, bacon, corn, soybeans, and wheat, and through an intermediary converting it into animal feed. That waste can then also become a revenue stream (rather than a cost) for the waste provider.

“But the biggest percentage of our revenue has been from recycling,” he said. “We have had customers in Mankato go from garbage being picked up five days a week to once every two weeks because most of the material they were having the garbage man pick up was shrink wrap, which can be recycled.”

Besides recycling, LJP Enterprises operates the Blue Earth County Landfill, formerly the Ponderosa Landfill, which doesn’t use taxpayer dollars for operations. It receives what can’t be recycled or burned for fuel. About the landfill, Biederman said, “Once you put material in a landfill, though, the problem is at some point the liner will probably leak. It’s not a question of if, but usually one of when. We try to convince our people that if you have something to landfill, you should landfill it. But if you can recycle or convert it to energy, that’s better.”

The company has more than 100 commercial accounts, including Taylor Corporation, three 3M facilities, and Kraft New Ulm. Most of them have an LJP Enterprises semi-trailer containing collapsible bins to help the company sort trash. As for residential waste: The company is the sole hauler of it in Madison Lake, Eagle Lake, Janesville, Nicollet, Good Thunder, and Courtland. And of course, it has contracts with 23 area cities in a five-county area that require the residential haulers of that waste—whether LJP Enterprises or not—to deliver it to the Mankato power plant, which could produce more electricity now if it had more fuel, Biederman said.

Biederman has been investigating other possible revenue streams, such as converting paper waste starch into alcohol and pressure-cooking waste to generate methane. Another possible growth area could be in persuading more commercial accounts to use their environmentally friendly services rather than sending waste through larger haulers to out-of-state landfills. Finally, Blue Earth County has been doing a feasibility study to see if enough natural gas exists at its LJP Enterprises-managed landfill to make harvesting it cost effective.

He has plans to expand and doesn’t seem worried about any of them going awry—or as Robert Burns would have said, “gang aft agley.” After all, that happened once before to Biederman and the result turned out exceedingly well.

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Birds and Bats

LJP Enterprises Owner Larry Biederman has a love for birds. Said Biederman: “I am really into birdwatching. We are really into feeding birds, and have different birdhouses on our property. We have houses for kestrels or sparrow hawks. We have several bluebird houses, and 14 wren houses.”

His wife is into bats—not baseball bats, but the flying dark ones. “At one time, she took around a live, rescued bat for educational purposes,” he said of his wife who also graduated from Gustavus Adolphus with a biology degree. “We have four bat houses on our property and hundreds of bats living there. There are more bat species than any other mammal and they are incredible insect eaters. We can see 50-60 bats coming out of our bat houses on a spring evening. When it gets cooler they are looking for a place to hibernate or a place to migrate.”

Reaching Out

CONNECT: Have corporations in our region been shy about using your services in order to avoid landfilling?

BIEDERMAN: Oh no. Our first customer wanting to avoid landfilling was ADM. Taylor Corporation companies also have been really adamant about not landfilling and so have our three 3M plants and Kraft New Ulm and Kraft Albany, which we service, even though we’re 150 miles from Albany. Most people don’t realize we service such a large area and handle such large volumes. Kraft has just put on a national campaign to go zero landfill.

CONNECT: But this isn’t the common perception—that large corporate clients are doing everything they can to not pollute.

BIEDERMAN: We started picking up the 3M plants in the ’90s: Fairmont, New Ulm, and Hutchinson. They were already trying back then to limit through various goals the amount going to landfill. I think they were doing it to be good corporate stewards and to reduce expenses. What makes us cost effective compared to a hauler that wants to landfill everything, we try pulling out all materials that have some value. It is certainly better than paying a tipping fee and associated taxes at a landfill. A tipping fee is the actual cost that a hauler would pay at the county landfill or Minnesota Waste Processing.