On 19 March 2009 BYU student Steve Hansen wasn’t in the Tanner Building atrium eating lunch with his peers. He wasn’t in Provo, in Utah, or even in the country. Hansen was across the Atlantic eating salmon and caviar with foreign dignitaries, government officials, and international investment CEOs at an invitation-only gala dinner at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco.
“There were so many utensils I had to watch everyone else to know what to do,” he recalls.
But silverware was the least of his concerns. The next afternoon Hansen was slated to speak at CleanEquity Monaco, an annual event hosting nearly forty next-generation Cleantech companies from all over the world. He would be presenting to two hundred delegates from investment, political, industry, and media communities.
Throughout the day Hansen noticed a pattern. “I don’t remember a presenter who wasn’t introduced as a doctor,” he recalls. “And there I was, a sophomore in college.” But as his audience soon found out, Hansen isn’t a typical twenty-two-year-old. He likes to solve problems, big ones. In just twenty-five minutes Hansen unfolded his solution to one of the world’s most serious waste problems that, he says, will revolutionize the railroad industry. How? One tire at a time.
“Most kids sleep with a blanket,” Hansen chuckles. “I slept with a six-inch rubber tire.” In 1972 Hansen’s father, also named Steve, was the first person in California with a permit to recycle tires. “My father is dyslexic, so I helped him a lot with paperwork and learned the business early on,” Hansen explains. “There are a lot of small things you can do with discarded tires, but the challenge is finding something with enough volume to make a difference.”
According to the EPA, Americans discard more than 300 million tires a year. There are an estimated 3 billion tires stockpiled in the United States and 10 billion worldwide. And because of their resistance to decomposition, they will remain in landfills for thousands of years.
Hansen saw this problem on a daily basis. At the age of fourteen, he took a job with the railroad. “My job was to sort old railroad ties, deciding which ones go to landfills, yards, and lesser rails,” he says. It wasn’t long before Hansen realized that railroads have their own bag of problems.
“Railroads spend billions of dollars a year replacing and maintaining tracks,” he says. Wood ties, the base for railroad tracks, need replacing every eight to fifteen years. “To replace all existing ties in the United States would require cutting down 173 million trees—trees that currently consume millions of tons of carbon dioxide,” Hansen explains. There are also a significant number of safety hazards caused by derailments from faulty ties. Railroad ties are treated and preserved using creosote, a carcinogen with so many harmful effects that Congress has banned its use for all other purposes.
Hansen, still in his teens, didn’t see the ties and tires as two large problems; instead he saw one huge opportunity to find a “green” solution. He would create a railroad tie from tire rubber. “We made an appointment with one of the vice presidents of Union Pacific to find out what they expect from an alternative tie,” he says. “We left the meeting with a spec sheet.” Hansen met with an engineer and asked him to develop a tie from tire rubber that met all the standards on the spec sheet—and the Hansen Tie was born.
Hansen Industries has spent years making and testing its ties, and in February 2009 the company officially launched, employing two Marriott School students and five BYU alumni. All the while Hansen continues his studies at BYU. “At this point I’m learning more outside the classroom than I am inside,” he says.
But Hansen hasn’t forgotten the importance of learning. “What got me to Monaco was an opportunity that came through formal education—the BYU Speed Pitch Challenge.” Hansen took first place at the 2009 competition in which students have three minutes to present their business plan to investors. His win led to additional wins at similar competitions, which culminated with a phone call from Silicon Valley: “There is a clean technology conference in two weeks in Monaco,” the investor explained. “It’s a closed event, but I know people involved and will try to get you in. They’ll want to hear what you’re doing.”
He was right. They did. Hansen left his presentation in Monaco with more than one hundred business cards from people wanting more information. But that was just the beginning. Hansen is speaking at similar conferences in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Thailand, and Japan. His company recently received a $100 million private grant, which will get their headquarters up and running. By next year Hansen plans to have at least 150 employees.
But if you ask this young entrepreneur about his company, it isn’t the money, travel, or prestige that gets him most excited. In fact, it’s hard to get him to expand on those feats. What really puts a grin on his face are the words, “In the first five years of production, we predict we will save more than 20 million trees. And that feels good.”
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Article written by J. Melody Murdock
Artwork by Rebecca Pletsch
