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Kenny Luong, president of Ming’s Recycling, says he works in “candyland.” At Ming’s biggest location on Florin Road in Sacramento, pressed bales of cans, bottles and other materials are piled as high as castle walls across the sprawling grounds. Riotously multicolored, they could be the building blocks of a fantasy world.

Kenny grew up in the recycling business, which may be why he can still see it with a child’s eye for wonder. His father, Ming Luong, started Ming’s Recycling in 1987, less than a decade after the Luong family — Ming, his wife Karen, and their four young children — arrived in the U.S. They were among the millions of people who fled Vietnam following the fall of Saigon, riding a fishing boat to a refugee camp in Malaysia before a church group sponsored their relocation to Laramie, Wyoming.

The Luongs lived in Wyoming for a year before moving to Sacramento, where a thriving Vietnamese community was taking shape (the city is now home to one of the 10 largest Vietnamese populations in the country). Ming started a small paper and cardboard recycling business out of the family’s S Street home in 1987 to make some extra money alongside his job as a mechanic at an auto body shop.

Kenny, who was then in high school, remembers helping his father fill out all the complicated paperwork for permits and certifications. He stayed invested in the growth of the family business even after heading to UC Davis to become a dentist — so much so that he ended up transferring to the accounting program at Sacramento State to better help out. “I worked full time in the day and went off to school full time at night,” he recalls.

His brother Kevin took a similar, if longer, route; after working as an orthopedic surgeon, he came back home to join Ming’s as marketing director and chief financial officer in 2006. Their sister Amy Luong and her husband Minhson Nguyen also work at the business, as do Kenny’s wife Kelly Luong, her brother Raymond Kwong and his wife Carol Kwong.

Ming’s Recycling now operates three facilities, two in Sacramento and one in Hayward, and is the largest CRV beverage container recycling company in Northern California; about 30 percent of all beverage containers collected in the state eventually reach one of their facilities. The family achieved this growth without ever taking on debt, Kenny says, which helped them weather rough points like the 2008 recession and China’s ban on recycling imports in 2018 — an existential moment for the global recycling industry.

All of Ming’s business is now on the commercial side, including storing and transporting material for other companies and operating the balers that create those candy-colored blocks. The family hopes to expand in the coming year with the help of a $5.3 million grant from CalRecycle (funded by the nearly 30 percent of CRV that remains unclaimed) to install optical sorting equipment. Retail buyback is no longer part of the business. The south Sacramento location closed its buyback center in 2023 — partly because a customer allegedly assaulted two employees, but also because it hadn’t been profitable for years.

That was difficult for Ming, now 94, who held sentimental value for the retail side and its role in building up the fledgling business. Despite being some three decades over retirement age, Ming still works three to four hours every day. “As a mechanic, he just loves working on equipment. That’s in his blood,” Kenny says — though he notes that the computerized machines that now run the industry sometimes frustrate him. “It keeps him active, and keeps him healthy.”

Soon all three generations of the Luong family will be working at Ming’s. Kenny’s 23-year-old son, Brandon, recently decided to quit his accounting job in New Jersey and will start at the company in January. “We never push any of our kids to join the business. We want them to explore what they like, go out there and get some work experience before they even think about working for us,” Kenny says. “But we’re ecstatic that Brandon has decided to do that.”

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