Eric Aguon Cruz

At an early age, Eric A. Cruz found out that money indeed can be had even under a pile of trash.

After school, the then 14-year-old Eric always tagged along with his father, the late Jacinto C. Cruz, as he did his rounds for the family’s trash collection company, Cruz Sanitation Services. It helped that the daily routine was a unique bonding session between dad and son as well.

The part-time job also instilled in the young Cruz’s mind the value of hard work—even if it was hauling someone else’s garbage—and it proved handy when he took over Cruz Sanitation Services soon after graduating from Marianas High School in 1986.

Rather than go to college abroad, Eric thought it was best to take the reins of the family business. His motivation: a baby on the way and a burning desire to grow the company his grandfather founded.

When Eric became operations general manager, Cruz Sanitation Services was not doing well as competitors have pirated a large chunk of its clientele.

He soon reorganized the company, restructured how it did business, and soon embarked in getting its old clients back and then some.

Exclusively catering to residential customers before, Eric decided in 1987 to expand to the commercial market and with it the company’s earnings grew three-fold.

Aided by the tourism boom in the islands, Cruz Sanitation Services enjoyed a period of prosperity the next 10 years—1988-1997.

It continued until the dawn of the new millennium when competition against other commercial trash collection agencies prompted Eric to change the company’s focus toward recycling.

Not only did the company’s business model evolved as the passing of Cruz patriarch, Jacinto, in 2002 warranted a change in the company name from Cruz Sanitation Services to Ericco Enterprises LLC.

It was under this new company that Eric entered a joint venture with Guam-based construction company, Maeda Pacific, to form Basula Produkto.

The partnership collects used aluminum softdrink cans, cardboard, plastic, electrical wires, abandoned cars, other metals, and even “white goods”—a term used to describe major household appliances and can also include computer monitors and casings.

Incidentally, Basula Produkto was awarded a 2006 Environmental Award by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region IX in San Francisco, California. It won the award based on its three years’ effort to rid Saipan of waste paper, cardboard, metals and plastics.

Aside from getting accolades for the thousands of tons of waste that it shipped off- island—sparing the finite capacity of the Marpi landfill—the past six years, Ericco Enterprises and Basula Produkto has also been a rousing business success with gross earnings of $1 million a year.

The company currently employs 80 people at its Lower Base facility.

Now, Eric is already looking forward to enjoying all the fruits of his hard labor by retiring at a relatively young age of 42 years old.

He wants to enjoy the freedom reaped from his financial success that brought him a six-bedroom house and eight cars, comfortable with the thought that his eldest son and heir apparent, Ellery S. Cruz, will dutifully carry on the family business as a fourth generation “trash to cash” businessman.