NEW ORLEANS (AP) — New Orleans trash mogul Sidney Torres is hoping his multimillion-dollar garbage business will make for good TV.

Torres, 34, and his company, SDT Waste and Debris Services — launched in response to the need for trash and debris removal after Hurricane Katrina — star in a pilot called “Trashmen,” premiering Thursday on the TLC Network.

The show will focus on Torres, a real estate developer who was set to start construction on a 70-unit condominium in New Orleans when Katrina struck in August 2005 and flooded 80 percent of the city. The storm prompted Torres to switch gears from construction to cleanup.

“I saw a need, and an opportunity,” he said.

Torres said he didn’t just want to clean up the city, he wanted to clean it up in style. His trucks are a high-gloss black with black tinted windows, chrome wheels and bright white logos — a bull Torres says is a tribute to Spain, his family’s country of origin.

“I wanted to have the cleanest, nicest trucks in the business,” he said.

Even the men working on the trucks are dressed to impress, Torres said. They wear black jumpsuits, steel-toed boots and black hats with the SDT bull logo.

Torres said his company went from bringing in roughly $700 a month in 2007 to bringing in $3.2 million monthly in 2010. His company has contracts in more than a dozen Louisiana parishes. One of his big-name customers is the New Orleans Saints.

“It shows that anyone has an opportunity to be a success, to be an entrepreneur,” Torres said. “If you put the right team together, you can be successful.”

Almost five years after Katrina, SDT has more than 150 trucks, 180 employees and a story the TLC Network wants to tell.

In the hour-long “Trashmen” pilot, Torres works to keep the city clean during last year’s Halloween weekend. Besides cleaning up Bourbon Street and the French Quarter, Torres and company had to handle the Voodoo Experience — an alternative outdoor music festival held at New Orleans’ City Park — and a Monday night New Orleans Saints game at the Superdome.

“The trash business is looked at as a business that people don’t really think about,” Torres said. “People tell their kids, ‘If you don’t go to school, you’re going to be a trashman.’ We’ve changed the way the industry is looked at here in Louisiana, and we think that if we’ve done that here, we can change the perception in the rest of the country too.”

Appearing in the pilot is musician Lenny Kravitz, a friend of Torres’ who owns a home in New Orleans and headlined last year’s Voodoo Experience.

“Trashmen” airs Thursday at 10 p.m. (ET/PT).

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On the Net

TLC, http://www.tlc.com