At the event, he debuted "the world's first cordless electric solar-powered ironing board vehicle," complete with "a little clicky thing" just to entertain little kids. It emerged through a curtain of bubbles, made by a solar-powered bubble machine.

Yet for all this, he's been oddly melancholy lately.

A champion of sustainability, he finds himself working 80-hour weeks with no vacation. "What's sustainable about our operation if I can't take a day off?" he laments. "It's a contradiction that really bothers me."

Every year, he comes up with a list of "spring projects" to tackle. This year, his biggest success was getting several stores in the Pottstown area to start selling organic milk in returnable bottles.

His "Children of the Great Oak" project involved collecting seedlings from a locally famous tree to nurture and eventually sell.

But he still feels as if he has all these ideas, and no one to help him do them.

"It's like, where are the people that are interested in making things happen? There are opportunities knocking, and I keep turning them down."

Can't people see the beautiful logic of something like his "Common Thread" project? His radical goal was to make something new from something old, generate no waste, run it off renewable resources, and employ disabled people.

What he came up with was collecting jeans, a universal piece of clothing that he sees as "a microcosm of society." He sends them a few miles away to Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, a farm community that includes adults with developmental difficulties, who weave the fabric into rugs. The trimmings return to Crater to be made into paper.

Even so, he often feels like a voice in the wilderness. "I'm so far outside the outside of the box," he says, "that I'm not even in the same country as the box."

A marriage and two serious relationships have foundered - he wonders if it's his consuming environmental ethic. He speaks of "the work I do and the pain it creates," adding, "I know I'm incredibly intense."

He has despaired of finding romance online. A computer recently matched him up with a smoking, meat-eating conservative.

But here's another contradiction: Crater, the recycler who wants recycling to become obsolete, is looking for a new place, one with room to handle more stuff and brainstorm more projects.

He would have an area for research and development, a store, a restaurant, sustainable "permaculture" gardens, and space for "micro enterprise concepts using renewable energy." He's posted the plans online and is trolling for support.

In his own life, his own waste stream, he thinks he can do better. He thinks maybe he can get down to four pounds a year. But it's getting difficult.

"I still can't figure out," he says, "what to do with those little silica things - the packs they put in vitamin bottles."

Recycling Services

Recycling Services Inc. is located near the intersection of Routes 422 and 100, on the Chester County side of the Schuylkill.

Address: 365 Elm St., Pottstown 19465