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A many companies close in on their 50th anniversaries, the founders tend to look back with nostalgia, celebrating their humble beginnings.
Not Charles Chrin. "He knows right now where this company is going to be in 25 years. He's a visionary," says his son, Greg Chrin, vice president of The Charles Chrin Cos.
Charles Chrin does not give interviews, Greg says, adding with gentle humor, "Even if he did, they'd be very short. He doesn't waste words."
The Charles Chrin Cos. is a diversified solid waste management firm. It has mushroomed over the years from its original waste trash hauling operation into four separate but related businesses involved in managing the earth's resources.
In the 49 years since its founding, the company has converted the eyesore that was once the old Easton dump in Williams Township into the Chrin Brothers Landfill, a sanitary and carefully maintained mountain of trash hidden under cover of grass.
The difference between a dump and a sanitary landfill is that a dump remains a dump, always an eyesore and allowing trash to break down into nasty components that penetrate the soil and send chemicals into the soil, while a landfill is controlled to the point of being environmentally friendly, becoming passive open space once it is closed.
The state Department of Environmental Protection regulates and inspects landfills, which, simply put, are required to stow the trash within watertight double liners of high density polyethylene above a thick bed of clay. The landfill also maintains a collection system for leachate, the liquid that drains to the bottom as rain and snow fall. The company operates a methane gas recovery system. Greg says the company's compliance with state regulations is "exemplary."
The original company was started in 1955, when Charles Chrin and his brother,
Nicholas, formed a partnership to haul waste in Palmer Township. Nicholas, now deceased, left the business in the 1980s. Charles still works every day, and with his sons, Dennis, Greg and Jim, oversees what has become a solid waste, hauling, quarrying, recycling and disposal business.
The company also now provides a full line of site contracting services and manages a land...