Whacking wood waste.

Chris Stapleton doesn't fit the profile of an environmental pioneer. Yet, the burly third generation contractor has built a booming business around solving some of Connecticut's waste problems.

With a big financial hand from the state, Stapleton a few months back opened Connecticut's first licensed wood waste recycling facility. Located in the hard working blue-collar town of Milford, on Long Island Sound, Stapleton's plant chews up wood construction debris and turns it into wood chip boiler fuel. Concrete is transformed into road gravel, and nails and screws become scrap metal. He calls his enterprise a "low cost, long-term solution to disposal problems."

His company, Stapleton Resource Recycling, looks from the highway like any other industrial warehouse, with scores of trucks going in and out. But inside, Stapleton, who is in his early 30s, has created a cutting edge environmental technology which he noticed in Europe a decade ago.

Stapleton first considered recycling as a line of work after he found himself unable to dispose of concrete slabs while on a construction job in nearby Westchester County, New York. Forced at great expense to drive the slabs back to Bridgeport, Conecticut - 40 minutes away - for disposal, he soon started a company which turned concrete slabs into road gravel used by the state's Department of Transportation.

Finding a place for construction debris became a major headache for the Nutmeg State during its late 1980s construction boom. Most of it ended up in Bridgeport's infamous "Mount Trashmore" - a two-acre pile of construction debris that was left to rot on the property of the Connecticut Building and Wrecking Company, in the heart of the city's East End, a poor African-American community.

After years of campaigning by community activists and with some help from the National Toxics Campaign and Reverend Jesse Jackson, the state cleaned up the site, which had actually started to compost. (Jackson made Mt. Trashmore a visible symbol of urban neglect when he led a week-long march from Bridgeport to Hartford, Connecticut in August 1991.)

Most of Stapleton's customers for boiler fuel are in northern New England and Europe. Since wood has the same BTU content as coal but spews a lot less pollution, Stapleton tried to convince the local electric utility, United Illuminating, to convert their coal-fired boilers to wood chip fuel but, unconvinced it would be cost-effective, they did not bite. Self-described "environmental entrepreneurs" like Chris Stapleton, a small but growing sector of our nation's economy, could use a little more encouragement. "I'm the solution to Mt. Trashmore," says Stapleton. With facilities like his, "that would not happen again."