Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Ryan Hickman. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Ryan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
I got started recycling when I was just three years old and since that time, my parents have supported me 100%. (I’m 13 years old)
My dad drives me everywhere and both of my parents (and my grandma) help me sort items and recycle. I think it takes a lot of focus to not get distracted and I always tell people that I speak to at events to follow their passion to make a difference. Over the years, I’ve had some people say that I possibly couldn’t be doing what I do because I’m just a kid or that my parents are making me recycle instead of being a “normal kid”. I have goals that I work towards and a LOT of support from my family, friends and school to make a difference. That really inspires me to continue making a difference in my community and to inspire others around the world.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
When I was about 3 1/2 years old, my dad took to me to our local recycling center with a few small bags of plastic bottles and I thought the recycling center was the coolest place I had ever been to. I was so excited that I asked our entire neighborhood to start recycling with me. I would give everyone bags each week and collect their cans and bottles to take to the recycling center.
I’m not sure why I liked it so much but it’s all I could think about. I wanted to recycle as much as possible. We live near the ocean so I would see bottles sometimes in the water or washed up on shore and my dad explained to me how it was harming the environment. I figured recycling was a way I could make a difference in saving the planet plus I even made a little money too.
I started recycling small of course but within a month or so, I started getting requests to come to other neighborhoods to pick up cans and bottles. Now instead of getting $10 or $20 at the recycling enter, I was getting $50 and sometimes $100 each weekend. Everyone wanted to help me recycle. I even got my entire elementary school to start recycling in all of the classrooms. I didn’t know anything about marketing at that point but my dad did and he and I made flyers to hand out to people and he made me business cards and we built a web site. My dad and I started posting photos on Facebook of us at the recycling center. We even made t-shirts with my logo on it and started selling them on my web site. I donated all the money we made from the shirt sales to help support marine animal rescue.
I’d collect cans and bottles from everyone who called me and then my dad and I would pick up the items, take them home and sort them and when we had enough, we’d take a load to the recycling center. Here in California where I live, if you recycle a plastic bottle or aluminum can, you get 5¢ back from the redemption center. A lot of people just throw them away so I figured why not start asking people to save them for me.
When I was first starting out, my dad and I would load up his truck and we would go to the recycling center once a month. As business grew, we started going more frequently. Soon, we were going to the recycling center twice a month and then every weekend like we do now.
I had been doing this for about 4 years and I had saved up $10,000 (which is a lot of money for a 7 year old) when my story suddenly went viral in December of 2016. I started getting thousands of emails and letters each day from all over the planet. We had posted a photo of me recycling on Facebook and somehow it got shared by millions of people.
I started getting interview requests and I started going on tv programs talking about what I was doing. Suddenly I was the face of a new generation of kids taking care of the planet. My little recycle business had gone global! I started getting partnership requests from companies around the world and I started speaking at events and appearing in tv commercials and magazine ads.
Last summer, I got interviewed by Lester Holt for NBC Nightly News so that was really cool and I’ve been on Nickelodeon, the Today Show, Good Morning America, ABC World News. CNN Heroes, and a bunch more programs and tv commercials. Also last year I was interviewed by the New York Times and USA Today the for stories they did on me. I’m a TIME Magazine KID OF THE YEAR finalist and Reader’s Digest even named me on their Top Kids of the Decade Changing the World List. I’ve spoke to arenas full of kids and I’ve been on billboards around the world.
As of today, I’ve recycled nearly 1.8 million cans and bottles! That’s 10 years of recycling pretty much every weekend and a few days during the week after school. If we laid all the cans and bottles I’ve recycled in a row end to end – it would stretch for 226 miles! Pretty crazy right?!
Last year we also started a city wide residential recycling service where we partner with the city and the State of California called Recycle From Home. We have a whole fleet of vans with drivers picking up recyclable items from homes in my community. It’s a lot of work but it’s exciting to get thousands of people recycling in our community.
Over the last 6 years, I’ve traveled around the world talking to people about my story and recycling with them. I’ve met all sorts of famous people and I can’t even remember how many interviews I’ve done. I’ve been featured in hundreds of magazines, books, tv programs I’m even part of many school study programs around the world where kids learn in the classrooms about how important it is to recycle. Last summer I went in a submarine in the Mediterranean Sea with OceanX to check out a shipwreck and I even recycled a bottle from the bottom of the ocean!
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
My dad made me a Facebook page when I was 4 and we shared photos of me recycling. We’d post every weekend with a total of how much I had recycled that week. I started gaining thousands of followers but things really took off when my story went viral. We started an Instagram page much later. We post almost daily now and I try to find things that I think would be interesting to the people checking out my pages. I offer recycling tips, show how I recycle and share images from trips around the world I go on.
I think it’s important to stay in touch with your audience through social media. I get about 1000 messages and emails a week from people all over the world that reach out to me. I wish I could answer everyone back but I have school and a lot of other stuff going on too. I think I have about a half million social media followers.
I’d suggest to people just starting out to not get bummed out if they don’t have a lot of people following or commenting on posts. It takes time to figure out what posts get better engagement. Also – I’m always asking people to follow me when I meet groups or speak at events. I try to do Instagram and Facebook live events to engage with people as well. That’s always fun to see who tunes in.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
When I first started, I wanted to give something to the people who were recycling with me. We made t-shirts and hats to give away and then we started selling them on my web site and donating the proceeds to my friends at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center for marine rescue. I was a little nervous about spending money on those items in case no body wanted them. We took a chance and made the first initial orders and to my surprise, we were overwhelmed with online orders and I’ve since sold thousands of shirts and hats all over the world. It’s been very cool to get photos from all over the world of people wearing their Ryan’s Recycling shirt or hats,
Contact Info:
- Website: www.ryansrecycling.com
- Instagram: @ryans_recycling
- Facebook: @ryansrecycling
- Twitter: @ryans_recycling
- Youtube: @RyanHickmanRecycling