Boston Green has evolved from waste oil collection services into a standalone provider of hazardous waste management and environmental field services. Having quintupled its revenue following its acquisition by Fort Point Capital, the company continues to expand and deepen its footprint across New England and the East Coast.
How has the industry evolved over the years?
For my family, environmental services have always been the family business. Our roots trace back to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) of 1976, the federal law that reshaped how the country managed hazardous and solid waste. When stricter regulations took hold in the 1980s, my father and his brothers responded by building a waste oil recovery and collection operation. That early work opened the door to soil remediation, hazardous waste transportation and disposal, and eventually the founding of Boston Green in 2007.
When I stepped into leadership in November 2022, Boston Green was still largely a pump-and-tank company, handling some hazardous waste transportation, disposal, and tank cleaning. Since then, we've transformed the business into a scaling waste management and environmental field services company, broadening both our capabilities and our reach.
The industry itself has changed just as dramatically. Waste management has become far more structured, regulated, and sophisticated. Capacity constraints have made accepting facilities more expensive, and tighter oversight has reshaped how companies like ours operate. These shifts demand a higher standard of compliance, expertise, and adaptability—and they are precisely the challenges we have built Boston Green to meet.
What kinds of chemicals and situations are you dealing with?
We use specialized equipment to provide industrial cleaning and hazardous waste transportation for factories, manufacturing and power plants, ships, petrochemical terminals, gas stations and the petroleum stream in every way, shape, and form. We respond daily to petroleum releases in the storage, distribution and sale of fuel. We handle chemical and other spills at loading docks, truck stops, gas stations and the roadside. We assist data centers with stormwater management and maintenance of backup generators, petroleum storage tanks and waste. And if a customer has virgin products left over in a tank, we can work with commodities markets to sell the fuel at market value. Ideally, we can repurpose these materials or move it straight to another tank instead of burning diesel fuel to truck it away to a treatment facility.
What kinds of emergencies have you mitigated?
Hazardous materials demand respect, and our team has seen firsthand how quickly a situation can turn dangerous. Gasoline tank rollovers, for instance, are highly volatile and unpredictable. In 2018, we managed a $2 million cleanup after a wastewater treatment plant over-pressurized and burst, sending sewage into surrounding wetlands. We also handle acids and aggressive caustic chemicals stored in plastic tanks, where even a small failure can have serious consequences. On one job, a roofing contractor dropped a tool that cracked a plastic valve, releasing a thousand gallons of a chemical that does not asphyxiate in open air but burns skin on contact.
Knowing our limits is just as important as knowing our capabilities.
When we receive calls about fentanyl in Boston, or requests to drill into something that could explode, we direct those callers to the fire department. We will not put our people's lives at risk. Instead, when we encounter an unfamiliar substance, we follow a disciplined protocol: we review the safety data, consult our health and safety officer, and confirm that we have the proper personal protective equipment in place before any work begins. That measured, safety-first approach protects our crews, our clients, and the communities we serve.
Are there regional considerations among your specializations?
Last winter, a big snowstorm caused a telephone pole to snap and smash a transformer with insulator oil in it. Then plow trucks smeared the oil all over a neighborhood, which was next to a reservoir. The spill was very hard and all mixed with snow. We put up a containment boom to isolate the spread and moved on to land cleanup that is still going on.
We recognize the concentration of customers across Massachusetts and the broader eastern New England region, and we are evaluating how best to serve them efficiently. While our office in southeastern Massachusetts currently supports the full area, growing demand north of Boston has made it clear that an additional location may be needed to better support both emergency response and scheduled service. Expanding our footprint would help us respond more quickly, reduce travel-related inefficiencies, and better meet the needs of customers in that region.
Have any regulatory changes affected your operations?
At the federal level, the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be moving toward a less restrictive regulatory posture in certain areas. In practice, however, that has had limited impact on our operations because the states in which we primarily work — including Massachusetts, throughout New England, New York, and Pennsylvania — continue to maintain robust environmental standards and enforcement frameworks.
From our perspective, well-designed regulation is essential. It protects public health, safeguards the environment, and creates the operational clarity needed for companies like ours to execute environmental cleanup and waste management work safely, compliantly, and efficiently.
Because we work closely with regulators through contracts, referrals, and field coordination, we also see where regulatory frameworks can create practical challenges in time-sensitive response situations. Emergency response is a good example. If there is an oil spill on a highway in the middle of the night, immediate action is required to contain the hazard, remove impacted material, and protect the public. In those scenarios, operational timelines are measured in hours, while certain administrative processes can take weeks. For instance, obtaining an EPA ID number may take significant time, even when transportation agencies or site conditions require hazardous waste to be removed without delay.
That is where we believe the conversation should focus: not on reducing protections, but on improving regulatory execution. The objective should be to preserve rigorous environmental safeguards while building enough flexibility into the system to support fast, responsible decision-making during emergency response and remediation activities.
Where are Boston Green’s plans for future growth?
If you do not embrace technology, you get run over. We are investing heavily in new systems for quotes, profile-filling, customer interactions, waste-tracking and other administrative streamlining. We are also expanding our industrial capabilities with new equipment and technologies.
The story behind our growth is one I am especially proud of. Fort Point Capital acquired a majority stake just this March, and their role now is to help us structure and systemize the operation so we can scale from $25 million to $100 million over the next five years. We are all in Boston and share the same vision.
To get there, we need to build greater density within our existing radius, hire more sales representatives, open a North Shore office and obtain additional transportation licenses in more states. We also plan to acquire or partner with like-minded businesses. Our 2030 goal is to be operating from Virginia to Maine, and as far west as Pittsburgh, Pa. We have earned tremendous success over the last several years through hard work, amazing partnerships, and we will keep building on that momentum.
