Company History

Company History

"Our Humble Beginnings"

Stay tuned for the embryonic story of our inception...deep in the heart of the Caribbean Jungles!

In 1994, missionary pilot Joe Hurston, and his wife, Cindy, directed a school and feeding program for 500 children in Haiti. Just before the new school year started, Hurston noticed that the printer cartridge was about to run out of toner. Since the upcoming registration required a lot of printing, Hurston went to Port-au-Prince to buy a couple of cartridges. The $250.00 price for each cartridge staggered him. Their missionary enterprise was funded by his flying ministry and interested sponsors, so it operated on a strict budget. The $250.00 price was simply unacceptable.

Since Hurston flew teams of volunteers in for short-term mission work, he asked team members to bring cartridges from the States. Customs officials though, poked and punctured the cartridges until toner ran out or else imposed tariffs. When Hurston checked with hospitals, schools and other mission organizations in Haiti, he found that some used as many as ten cartridges a month and the price was seriously affecting their nonprofit budgets.

Hurston decided to find a solution. After researching remanufacturing toner cartridges, he invested $500 in a kit and training video. One morning when an ocean breeze cooled his non electric home, Hurston cleared the red-vinyl covered dining room table and laid out the parts of the kit: a special vacuum cleaner, bottles of toner, wiper blades, rags, alcohol, cotton swabs, a special set of pliers, and a training video. He fired up the generator, made sure the voltage was regulated, and projected the picture on the stucco dining room wall. During the next hours, Hurston started and stopped the video, muttered and sputtered, and started and stopped the video, but at 7:15 in the evening he popped a remanufactured cartridge into his printer.

It worked!

Euphoric, he grabbed his two-meter radio and contacted a nearby mission station that had the same type of printer and was also struggling with paying for high-priced cartridges. "I did it! I broke the code! I remanufactured a print cartridge," he told his friend.

The neighboring missionary, not given to emotion, was silent for a moment, then said, "That's great! That is just great news. It's going to help a lot of people." That evening Hurston went to sleep with a tremendous sense of accomplishment. He could remanufacture the cartridges he needed and possibly help other organizations.

The next morning, he awakened early to his dog barking. A big box had been set on his front porch. It held a dozen empty print cartridges. Word had gone out that "Joe could recycle print cartridges." From that day on remanufacturing print cartridges provided income for aviation fuel, food and education for the school children, and income for Hurston's family.

Today, CSA is one of the fastest growing small businesses in Florida, but its beginnings were humble. CSA truly has its roots in Haiti, in a village between the sea and the cane fields, in a house without electricity and running water, and at a red-vinyl covered table.

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