A Family, a Fresh Start, and a Test

Every Santa Barbara story begins with an arrival. The Borgatello family's happened in 1911, when Segundo and Josephine Borgatello left Asti, Italy - a wine-rich hill town known for its vineyards, and crossed the Atlantic with Josephine's brother, Albino Prato. Like so many families of that era, they came chasing a new life on the American Riviera. They settled in Montecito and raised five children: Charlie, Augusta, Laura, Ida, and the youngest, Mario, born on Cota Lane in 1917.

The dream was tested almost immediately. When the Spanish flu swept the world in 1918, it did not spare the newly arrived Borgatellos. Just seven years after reaching America, and only months after Mario was born, both Segundo and his brother-in-law Albino died. Josephine survived, though she never fully recovered.

Suddenly a widow in a new country, speaking no English, with five young children to feed, Josephine did the only thing she knew how to do: she went to work. A master seamstress, she made clothes for Montecito's wealthiest families and opened the two cottages on her property to Italian immigrants - a clean bed, two meals a day, and fresh laundry in exchange for rent. Everyone in the family pitched in.

Her children grew up understanding something that would one day define a company: when times are hard, waste is not an option. Not food, not materials, and certainly not effort.

Two Brothers and a Two-Wheeled Wagon

In the late 1920s, brothers Mario and Charlie Borgatello did whatever they could to help their mother and sisters get by. That included pulling a hand-drawn, two-wheeled wagon along School House Road, collecting food scraps from Montecito residents to feed the hogs the family raised.

Then came the question that changed everything. The same households that gave the brothers their scraps began asking:

"While you're here — would you just take all of it?"

At the time, most estates had their trash burned or buried in the backyard. Nobody offered a better way. So Mario and Charlie made the decision to become that better way.

With a 1931 Chevy pickup, the brothers began hauling door to door - collecting directly from homes, replacing liners, and delivering a level of care people simply hadn't seen before. And at the end of each day, they did something decades ahead of its time: they sorted through everything they collected, recovering metal, glass, cotton, and nylon - anything that could be reused or resold.

During the Great Depression and the war mobilization of the 1940s, that resourcefulness wasn't a marketing idea. It was survival. It was for their family, and for a country that needed every scrap of material it could find. Waste less. Use more. Do the job right. That early mindset became the foundation MarBorg still stands on today. By 1936, the brothers had earned enough to buy their first real trash truck - a Ford stake-side flatbed - and in 1939 they made it official, forming Borgatello Brothers Hauling.

Channel Disposal and the Post-War Boom

As Santa Barbara grew, so did the brothers' business. In the 1950s, the company, by that point headquartered on East Valley Road, took on a new name: Channel Disposal.

Around the same time, Mario and his wife, Peggy, bought property on San Antonio Creek Road in the Goleta Valley, where the family kept its hog farm going. In a fitting piece of Borgatello practicality, food scraps from the nearby Marine base made excellent feed for the pigs. The habit formed on School House Road - finding value in what others threw away - never went out of style.

MarBorg is Born

In the early 1970s, Mario and Charlie reached a crossroads and made the difficult decision to part ways in business. They divided the territory they'd built together: Charlie would keep serving Montecito under Channel Disposal, and Mario would take the Goleta area under a new name that joined his first and last - MarBorg.

Mario didn't build it alone. In 1974 he formally established MarBorg alongside his two sons, Mario A. and David Borgatello. Mario A. and David soon became president and vice-president, and the two brothers poured themselves into the business the same way their father and uncle had a generation earlier - one route, one customer at a time.

The two family companies operated side by side for nearly twenty years, each respecting the other's ground. Then, in 1995, the story came full circle: MarBorg purchased Channel Disposal, reuniting the business two boys had started with a wagon nearly seventy years before. Well into his later years, Mario F. Borgatello still came to the office every day, until he no longer could. He passed away in Santa Barbara in 2013, having lived a full life that achieved the truest version of the American dream.

Growing Up MarBorg

For the third generation, MarBorg wasn't just the family business - it was more like the family backyard. Mario A. and his wife, Judy, raised four children: Brian, Theresa, Anthony, and Andrea. David and his wife, Louise, raised three daughters: Kathy, Kerri, and Kristine. All of them helped out growing up - Brian and Theresa became official employees in high school; Kathy, Kerri, and Anthony joined after college.

They didn't just inherit the company - they expanded it. Fresh out of college and seeing room to grow, Anthony teamed up with his cousin Kerri to launch MarBorg's portable toilet division, which grew to include septic services, temporary fencing, and luxury restroom trailers. The recycling roots deepened, too. In 1991, in a corner of the MarBorg yard, the team began a construction and demolition recycling program the old-fashioned way - dumping containers on the ground and sorting through them by hand, just as Mario and Charlie had done sixty years earlier. When Union Pacific sold the property across the street, MarBorg seized the chance to expand, completing a state-of-the-art recycling facility in 2000 that processes 200,000 tons of material a year. Along the way, the family installed one of the largest solar systems in the county because they believed that a company built on wasting less should run that way, too.

The Next Generations

In 2017, Brian Borgatello, who worked his way up from sorter to driver to supervisor, became president of MarBorg Industries - marking the third generation of family leadership. He leads alongside Kathy Koeper, Administrative Director, and Derek Carlson, Vice President of Finance and Contracts, with the steady counsel of the generation before them: Mario A., Chairman of the Board, and David, Vice President, both still shaping the decisions that guide the company forward. When Anthony retired in 2025 after building the portable services division from the ground up, its operations came under Brian's leadership.

And the next chapter is already being written. Brian's sons Austin, Brian David, and Nathan serve as Roll-Off Supervisor, Operations Manager - Northern County, and Tip Floor Lead. Kathy's son Jacob, a Special Services Driver, recently earned his Class B license to begin driving a trash truck - the fourth generation of Borgatellos behind the wheel.

The Story Continues

Today, MarBorg Industries serves more than 40,000 customers across Santa Barbara County and the Central Coast, with over 375 employees providing residential and commercial collection, recycling, construction site services, portable sanitation, and temporary fencing.

The trucks are bigger. The facilities are more advanced. But the company is still watering the seed planted by two boys and a wagon on School House Road: take care of your customers, find value in what others overlook, stand behind your service, and never lose sight of where you started.

At MarBorg, service isn't just what we do. It's the foundation we were built on - four generations deep, and growing.