The King of Trash Returns to Bay Area Screening Series

The King of Trash, a feature documentary directed by Errol Webber, returns to the Bay Area for a new round of public screenings, tracing the journey of Vietnamese refugee David Duong and his family as they built a leading recycling enterprise in California and Vietnam.

In April 1975, as Saigon fell, David Duong led 23 family members onto a small boat and into the open sea. They had lost their family paper-recycling business in South Vietnam. After months in a refugee camp in Mandaluyong, Philippines, the family arrived in the United States in 1979 as strangers in a land of promise: one apartment filled with seventeen people and without a dime to their names. At night, they collected bottles and cardboard from the streets of San Francisco. By day, they studied and worked.

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 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, California Waste Solutions 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, while 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.

Reliability, the company maintains, is not only measured by how much waste is collected but by whether communities can depend on the system without having to think about it. Preparation before dawn, coordination across people and machines, and the refusal to treat any honest job as small is the foundation upon which the Duong family's first truck to a municipal recycling franchise that now serves two of California's major cities was built. The King of Trash highlights all this in a vivid account and several dramatizations.

Family leadership remains the operating model. Kristina Duong oversees financial operations as CFO. Victor Duong, who started by driving trucks, leads operations and community partnerships. David's son, Michael Duong, now serves as president, carrying the work into a third generation.

The same principle that built CWS was carried back across the Pacific. Vietnam Waste Solutions, founded by the family, developed the Da Phuoc Integrated Waste Management Facility and the Long An Green Environmental Technology Park. VWS manages up to 7,500 tons of waste a day in the Ho Chi Minh City region, introducing landfill engineering, leachate treatment, and environmental monitoring at a scale the city urgently needed.

The documentary also highlights the family's community work on both sides of the ocean: a $5 million Fulbright-affiliated scholarship initiative, support for cancer patients, more than $46,000 for Vietnamese language and cultural schools, more than $105,000 in aid after Typhoon Yagi, and backing for youth programs such as the Oakland Dynamites.

The King of Trash is not framed as a simple success story. It is a record of storm, hunger, crowded apartments, midnight collection routes, used trucks, municipal contracts won the hard way, and the daily machinery of recycling that most residents never see.

The Bay Area is where that rebuilding began. San Jose is home to one of the country's largest Vietnamese American communities. For many families in the theater, the history on screen is not distant but rather, it is their own.

The documentary will screen in the Bay Area as follows:

- Dublin Special Screening, Saturday, September 19, 2026, 5:00-7:00 p.m., Regal Hacienda Crossings - San Jose Final VIP Pre-Screening, Saturday, September 26, 2026, 4:00-8:00 p.m., AMC Eastridge. David Duong, members of the cast, and director Errol Webber are expected to attend. - Emeryville Special Screening, Saturday, October 3, 2026, 5:00-8:00 p.m., AMC Bay Street Emeryville - Red Rock Film Festival (Utah), Friday, September 25, 2026

RSVP and event details: www.thekingoftrash.us/festival-journey

California Waste Solutions Inc, 1211 Embarcadero, Suite 300, Oakland, CA 94606. www.calwaste.com.