Young entrepreneur's company safely recycles
computers
You want your computer recycled safely and your data
destroyed?
Nathan Zack is your man. Zack is the 26-year-old CEO
of the rapidly growing Great Lakes Electronics
Corp., a company he founded out of his parents’
Farmington home when he was 19. Today the company
has 80 employees and 75,000 square feet in a
sprawling old industrial complex at Greenfield Road
at I-96 in Detroit. It also has operations in
Daytona Beach, Fla., Orlando, Fla. and Tilbury,
Ontario.
And when Great Lakes Electronics talks about
“demanufacturing,” that means taking your old
computers, servers, mainframes, cable boxes, TVs and
other electronics, and smashing them to bits.
Literally, itty bitty bits. The company has a
15-foot-tall shredder that chews up computers into
chunks no bigger than a quarter. And for those who
still want the personal touch, the plant even
features a guy at a table with a hammer. Hard drive,
time to meet your maker.
Zack said he started dealing in used computers as a
teen-ager, but “my mom was an environmentalist, and
she said, ‘Why don’t you try to recycle these
computers?” And so the business was born. The
shredded computer chunks go to a separator in Canada
that picks apart the iron, aluminum and plastics,
and ships them to companies that recycle those
specific materials.
The company even safely recycles burned-out
fluorescent light bulbs, using a gizmo that smashes
the glass and captures the mercury they contain in a
filter. The Detroit operation handles 50 tons of
scrap a day. And it also records the serial number
and other information for every computer destroyed,
using a home-grown bar scanning system and Kmart
Corp.’s old wireless bar code scanners.
The process diverts the lead, cadmium, lithium and
other toxics electronics contain from landfills. “We
have a zero landfill policy,” Zack said. “Nothing
here goes into the landfill, from the plastic
packaging to the wood we use. Our old wood is sent
to a chopper and he turns it into mulch.”
Great Lakes is also getting into conducting
electronics recycling drives with retailers and
municipalities. A recent weekend effort with West
Bloomfield Township netted 25 tons of materials in
six hours; another effort with Best Buy, more than
75 tons. The Detroit headquarters also contains the
company’s telemarketing and sales staff.
For the future, Zack is looking at more locations in
Florida and the west and southwestern states. Just
how big the company gets, he says with a laugh,
“depends on what my pain threshold is.”
