New Screenings of The King of Trash Show What It Took David Duong To Build Green Waste Recycling Giant California Waste Solutions

As The King of Trash returns to the Bay Area for a new round of public screenings, audiences are seeing more than a refugee origin story. Directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Errol Webber, the feature documentary shows what it actually took for David Duong, the tireless Founder and CEO of California Waste Solutions, to turn night-time bottle collecting on the San Francisco streets into one of America's leading family-owned recycling enterprises and a major waste-management operation in Vietnam.

After an eight-city U.S. pre-screening tour that drew more than 5,000 attendees in San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento, Orange County, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., and Orlando last year, the film is back in the communities where the Duong family rebuilt their lives. Nearly 1,000 people have registered or joined waiting lists for the current Bay Area dates. The production has also been selected for the 2026 Red Rock Film Festival in Utah.

In April 1975, as Saigon fell, David Duong led 23 family members onto a small boat and into the open sea. They had lost the family paper-recycling business in South Vietnam. His father, Jim Thu Tai Duong, known in Vietnam as Vua Rác, or "The King of Trash", had built that company on a simple rule: "nothing should be wasted", not materials, not opportunity, and not human potential.

In time, that honor became a booming business. In 1992, David founded California Waste Solutions in Oakland with eight used trucks and a promise to his parents that the family would rebuild the right way, through service, transparency, and respect for every customer.

"We came to this country with nothing but hope. Everything we built came from hard work and faith," David Duong tells the director in The King of Trash.

The documentary and California Waste Solutions' own operations record make the same point: the company was not built in a single leap. It was built route by route and shift by shift over more than three decades. Today CWS serves more than 343,000 customers across Oakland and San José and operates six Bay Area recycling facilities. The Oakland operation processes about 1,000 tons of material a week. San José handles about 1,300 tons a week. Across its life the company has managed more than three million tons of material, with more than 717,000 tons processed annually.

The first Oakland franchise arrived in 1993. The family later expanded into San José while building a full operating network around collection, processing, customer service, and the marketing of recovered commodities. A May 2026 California Waste Solutions briefing, "Behind the Scenes: What It Takes to Keep Recycling Running Every Day," describes the unseen discipline that still holds the system together. It's the same discipline the film traces back to those first nights on San Francisco streets. Each day begins before most neighborhoods are awake. Drivers and operations teams inspect vehicles, check equipmen...