Our Story
The Piccinonna Legacy: Fourth Generation
Angela, Amanda & Amber Piccinonna — The Garbage Girls: Carrying the Piccinonna Legacy Forward
The fourth chapter in a four-part series tracing the Piccinonna family’s journey through four generations of hard work, hauling, entrepreneurship, and family.
For three generations, the Piccinonna family waste story passed primarily from father to son. Then came the fourth generation. Three daughters.
Angela, Amanda, and Amber.
The daughters of Carlo Piccinonna did not discover the waste business as adults. They grew up inside of it. The trucks, the employees, the customers and the conversations about business were simply part of life. For the Piccinonna sisters, waste wasn’t some unusual industry their father happened to work in, it was the family business.
Growing Up Around the Business
Some of our earliest memories are connected to the companies our family built. There were company trucks on the road. Employees who knew our family. Conversations about work at home. Long days, problems that had to be solved, and the constant understanding that family and business were deeply connected.
As we grew older, each of us began finding our own place within the industry. We didn’t all gravitate toward the same responsibilities, and that became one of our strengths. Each sister developed her own experience, personality and approach to business while sharing the same understanding of what the Piccinonna name represented.
By the time Great Waste was created in 2011, we weren’t simply Carlo’s daughters watching from the sidelines. We were part of the industry ourselves.
The “Garbage Girls”
In 2012, the three Piccinonna sisters were featured together in a South Florida newspaper story that referred to us as the “Garbage Girls.” The name stuck. There was something about it that perfectly captured the contradiction people sometimes saw when they met us. Three sisters, three women, working in garbage. But to us, there was never anything unusual about it.
This was the world we grew up in. We knew the trucks, we knew the customers, we knew the business. Most importantly, we knew the generations that came before us. Being women in a traditionally male-dominated industry became part of our story, but it was never the entire story. The bigger story was legacy.
The Fourth Generation
We are proud to call ourselves the fourth generation of the Piccinonna family in the hauling and waste industry, and we understand that being fourth generation does not simply mean inheriting a story. It means becoming responsible for it. A family legacy cannot survive on nostalgia alone. Every generation must decide whether it is willing to do the work required to carry it forward. For us, that means honoring the lessons that began long before any of us were born.
Giulio taught us dependability. Joseph taught us the importance of building a family business and passing knowledge forward. Carlo taught us entrepreneurship, perseverance and the courage to start again. Now our generation has to decide what we will add to the story.
More Than Garbage
Over the years, we have learned that this family’s story has never really been about garbage. Garbage was simply the business. The story is about something much bigger. It is about an immigrant coming to America and building a life. It is about a son honoring his father by naming a company after him. It is about a young entrepreneur risking everything to create something of his own. It is about a father raising three daughters around a business he loved. And now it is about those daughters deciding that the story deserves to continue.
That is what Garbage Girls represents to us today. Not simply three women who happen to work in the waste industry. It represents four generations of people who kept building.
What Happens Next
When we look backward, we see horses and wagons.
Ice deliveries, Carting trucks, Garbage trucks, Roll-off containers, Companies that were created, Companies that changed, Companies that were sold, and new companies that began again.
When we look forward, we see another opportunity. An opportunity to preserve the stories that came before us. An opportunity to continue building businesses. An opportunity to share the lessons our family learned. And eventually, an opportunity to pass those lessons to another generation.
The equipment will continue to change. The industry will continue to change. The names painted on the trucks may even change. But there are certain things we hope never do:
Hard work, Integrity, Respect, Family, Keeping your word, and Refusing to give up.
Four generations later, the Piccinonna family is still building. We are still learning. We are still dreaming and our story is far from finished.
Because if there is one thing generations of Piccinonnas have taught us, it is this:
We persevere and we dream big.