Mel Pervais

At age sixteen, Pervais started work as a night watchman for the Jones Construction Company.[2] Two months later, he took the opportunity to begin an apprenticeship as an instrument technician with Noranda Mines in Cutler, Ontario. Over the next seventeen years, he held various positions in the power generation industry before joining Johnson Controls in 1973 as the manager of a newly formed calibration engineering department. Pervais redirected the department's focus to nuclear power, boosting sales from $100,000 to $5 million over three years.

Pervais left Johnson Controls in 1976 and, with his expertise and $10,000, started Amalgamated Services in Philadelphia with a business partner, providing engineering services to nuclear power plants.[3] In 1979 the company merged with Cataract Engineering and Construction and Pervais became president.[3] Never shy about his Indian heritage, Cataract's logo had an Indian motif and the company strived to hire Indian employees.[3] Cataract also used a unique bonus and salary system to discourage sick days and draw talent from other companies; it was not uncommon for workers to out-earn their bosses, with some field technicians earning $90,000 a year.[4]

Pervais sold Cataract Inc. through an employee stock ownership program for $20 million.[5] At the time, Cataract had 500 engineers and technicians and reported annual sales of $50 million.[1] He retired at age 45 to focus on a horse breeding and cattle operation on the Chief Joseph Ranch near Darby, Montana.[1] The Los Angeles Times reported in 1984 that Pervais was one of the wealthiest Native Americans in the United States.[3]

In 1991, Pervais returned from retirement to found Rhodium 2001, dedicated to recycling materials from scrapped catalytic converters. Pervais put more than $2 million of his own money into the new company, originally housed in a remodeled calving barn on his ranch.[6] Pervais and partner Don Golbeck bought a license to a process developed by metallurgist inventor and chemical engineer C.A. Dickey to refine precious group metals from automotive catalytic converters, a process they used to retrieve a number of materials, including fine sand for the asphalt industry and platinum, palladium and rhodium compounds to sell to refiners.[7]

Rhodium 2001's extraction process is notable for being environmentally friendly, requiring no smelter nor airborne emissions, and for being a closely guarded secret. It took two years of research and development by Dickey, who claimed it involved temperature and pressure. Neither Pervais, nor Dickey, were willing to reveal more about the process than that, for fear that other competitors might adopt it, rendering their company irrelevant. Said Pervais, "If you're an environmentalist, it's probably the greatest invention. I don't need a polluting process. I'd stay retired if that was the case."[6]