Waste not, want not: Fleet Genius brings eco-friendly container repairs, jobs to Rochester

A Naples, Fla.-based environmental services company that has been on a growth path is continuing its expansion efforts, opening a new location in Rochester.

The local site — which recently opened — is the first FleetGenuis LLC location in New York.

“We are looking forward to putting down roots in Rochester,” said Andreas Gruson, the firm’s founder, chairperson and CEO.

He expects to initially create 40 jobs at the new location and is currently looking for positions of varying skill levels, including general laborers and welders.

Gruson said opening a location in Rochester was a strategic decision for the firm. Two of its largest customers — Casella Waste Systems and Waste Management (WM) — have their own substantial customer bases in the region.

Additionally, Rochester’s proximity to other cities, including Buffalo and Syracuse, as well as easy highway access to municipalities further away such as Albany, made it an attractive location as well.

FleetGenius’ local site is at 20 Cairn Street in Rochester. The vacant site used to house Central Auto Auction.

Gruson plans to make the Rochester site the company’s first super center model, which could then be duplicated in other states in the South and across the Midwest.

The super center site provides not only container repairs and compactor services but will also eventually incorporate manufacturing, he explained.

Gruson said the 26,000-square-foot building on 16 acres in Rochester allows for such expansion and added that manufacturing there could happen in the near future.

“This local site could be much larger in the near term,” he said, adding the Rochester site is the only FleetGenius location slated for New York.

Gruson — a veteran in the environmental services industry in the United States and Latin America — founded FleetGenius in 2018 with the goal of creating a customer focused container and compactor solutions platform.

FleetGenius provides a full range of container solutions for solid waste haulers, municipalities and any business or government entity with a large fleet of waste, recycling, organics, industrial, intermodal and/or construction and demolition containers.

Among the company’s products are containers, compactors and industrial equipment. Its services include plastic and metal container maintenance, container washing, route audit services and bulky item collection.

The company has completed several acquisitions over the past few years that have expanded its capabilities, including acquisition of CDSRVS, LLC and DSRVS, LLC and Container Management Group, LLC (collectively, CanDO) in 2019, which expanded the FleetGenius’ metal container service capabilities.

Last year the company acquired the compactor distribution, installation, service, maintenance and refurbishment business of National Waste Partners, a holding company with several subsidiaries.

As a result of acquisitions, as well as organic growth, FleetGenius has become one of the leading companies in the container and compactor space with an established national presence in 27 states and roughly 650 employees, Gruson said.

He noted that the firm can save customers money by enabling them to maximize the use of their containers and minimizing the overall lifetime cost to manage, own, service and maintain them.

Gruson added there is a commitment to sustainability at FleetGenius.

Those efforts include utilizing poly welding repair to repair plastic carts that would have previously been scrapped, operating a large fleet of electric vehicles and having the industry’s first automated container sanitizing and cleaning process.

Another effort focused on sustainability is its Core X program, he said.

Under the program, the company will remove a customer’s old containers or compactors from their existing location and deliver them back to one of the FleetGenius facilities where they will be evaluated for repair and refurbishment or exchanged for a brand-new unit.

Not only are the efforts environmentally friendly, but they also make economic sense, Gruson noted.

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