So, everyone in the industry says they're the best choice for your recycling needs. So what makes us any different from the next 100 companies? Several things....
- Most of the smaller companies doing this work perform one major function - they sort the equipment into sellable and non-sellable items, then they dismantle the non-sellable equipment. This means that they turn around and sell the sorted pieces and parts (motherboards, hard drives, memory, etc.) to another, larger recycler. That recycler is known as a downstream vendor or DSV. They take the sorted or unsorted materials and bundle them with many others, and usually sell them in large parcels to refiners, many of which are in third world countries.
- The big boys generally have a process where everything is thrown into a shredder and fed into a giant furnace, which burns off the plastics and fiberglass, and leaves a molten pile of slag, which is then processed to recover all of the metals. At large scale, this has proven to be a very efficent (profitable) method for most of the large recyclers.
Here is where we go down a different road...
- We sort, dismantle, depopulate, recycle and refine everything. This means we take the dismantled board, depopulate them (remove all of the components), process them and sort the output into three main streams: glass fibers, resins & plastics, and mixed metals. We have buyers for the glass fibers and the plastics & resins, and those find their way into new products. The mixed metals move to our refinery operation and are separated and then sold on the metals markets.
- Our process requires roughly 1/20th of the energy needed to process the same equipment through a traditional large-scale process, and has almost none of the same environmental concerns.
- Our process returns the plastics, resins and glass fibers into the economy, rather than burning them off, forever losing that material.
- We know that our process is more labor-intensive than simply throwing it all in the shredder. But it enhances our recovery rates and allows us to pursue a more economical and environmentally friendly course.