7/12/2007 10:57:00 AM
Recycler of waste products helps save the
environment.
Bill Carroll
Special to the Jewish News
Nathan Zack owns 700,000 pounds of electronic waste
stored in an 80,000-square-foot warehouse on
Detroit's west side. That resource is just part of
the Jewish entrepreneur/environmentalist's Great
Lakes Electronics Corp., a
multi-million-dollar-a-year recycling business with
branches in Florida and Ontario. Zack also owns a
couple of scrap yards on the side. And he's only 26
years old. "I'm an environmentalist first, then a
businessman second," declares Zack of Birmingham,
who founded the business in his basement after
dropping out of North Farmington High School, and
has built it into one of the top five electronic
waste disposal companies in the United States.
"Waste is an enormous and growing environmental
problem, and I want to help rid the country of waste
products," he said. "We recycled more than 31
million pounds of electronics alone last year, and
we hope to go over 60 million pounds this year.
That's how we measure this business - in pounds of
waste, not dollars and cents." Zack, Great Lakes
Electronics CEO and president, and Kerry Grushoff,
52, of Farmington Hills, who is vice president of
marketing and a family friend, like to call it
"de-manufacturing, de-labeling and destruction."
There are small pieces of electronics everywhere
after the larger items are squashed and practically
pulverized by every type of destruction machine
imaginable. There's even a special unit that sucks
any valuable commodity out of a typical fluorescent
light bulb and destroys the rest.
The Startup
Zack always has been interested in "tearing down stuff," and his mother,
Karen, a Greenpeace activist, got him even more
interested in the environment and a commitment to
"being green." She is one of 65 employees at Great
Lakes Electronics' main office on Greenfield Road at
Fullerton. But the death of his father when Zack was
15 led Nathan on the circuitous route to making some
money and helping the environment. He dropped out of
North Farmington to help support his mother and his
twin sister, Marni, now an attorney in Chicago.
According to Grushoff, Zack started with a
landscaping business and then worked at his cousin's
Florida scrap yards, where he realized the potential
for electronics recycling. From the family basement
in Farmington Hills, Great Lakes Electronics has
mushroomed during the past eight years. "When I
started this business ... we recycled only about 200
pounds of stuff a week," Zack said. He tore apart
computers and sold the material to local scrap
dealers and refiners.
He then began to invest in equipment and larger locations. Companies like
DTE Energy, Best Buy, Kmart, Sears and Quicken
Loans/Rock Financial pay Great Lakes to dispose of
unwanted and broken computers, monitors, hard
drives, keyboards, circuit boards, cathode ray
tubes, fluorescent bulbs, cable boxes, television
sets, VCRs, small household appliances, ferrous and
non-ferrous metals and other products. After
breaking down the items and removing any parts of
value for resale, the rest is shredded and shipped
to be melted. "More than 500 million PCs will be
relegated to scrap in the U.S. alone this year,"
Zack pointed out. "Hazardous amounts of toxic heavy
metals, including lead, cadmium and mercury, make it
critical to keep these materials out of landfills
and incinerators. "When you throw away a computer
with nine pounds of lead in it, the mercury vapor
can seep through a landfill and possibly enter the
water supply. A few years ago, about 150 million PCs
had been buried in those landfills; not very many
were recycled." What we do here is not too much
different than the operation of the old Jewish-owned
scrap yards of an earlier generation - only it's a
modern version with modern requirements, equipment
and techniques."
Doing Business
Great Lakes' main source of revenue is the major companies that sell it
their unwanted products for 35 to 50 cents per
pound. These companies are contacted daily by a
battery of telemarketers. Three Great Lakes trucks,
and rented vehicles as needed, bring the material to
the Greenfield location." We do business with
hundreds of companies and governmental agencies
around the country - we seem to get about 50 new
customers a day," Grushoff said. "With our two
branches in Florida, one in Ontario, and one to open
soon in Chicago [with 35 new employees], we can pick
up almost anywhere in the country." Great Lakes will
purchase certain materials "that still have useful
life," said Grushoff, such as Pentium-level
computers, controllers and servers, floppy drives
and CD-Rom drives, RAM chips, circuit cards, various
types of software, and miscellaneous parts and
components. The company sells a small amount of
valuable items on the Internet's e-Bay system.
Destructive Benefit
With identity theft the fastest-growing crime in America, Great Lakes
offers "state-of-the-art security destruction," Zack
explained. When materials are received, all
proprietary labels, stickers and other forms of
identification are removed, including any asset
labels. As computer hard drives are destroyed, for
example, a camera records the process for clients
who wish to verify a computer's destruction. "Agents
from the U.S. Secret Service, the Department of
Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection
Agency, hospital personnel and others often witness
their machines being shredded and receive a
certificate of destruction. "We even destroyed a
tank once, with a bunch of officials observing,"
said Zack.
"There's a big need to eliminate identity theft, and we do our best to
help. And all of our work is audited by the EPA."
Lakeside Equipment Co. of Detroit is a typical firm
that uses Great Lakes' services. When machine shops
and other small industrial firms acquire new
machinery and equipment, Lakeside relies on Great
Lakes to pick up and destroy the old equipment. "We
interact often with Great Lakes, and I personally
supervise the destruction of the equipment," said
Larry Horowitz of West Bloomfield, managing partner
at Lakeside. "I like the fact that the people at
Great Lakes are very environmentally conscious -
their attitude spills over on the rest of us. The
company is very ethical, professional, prompt and
thorough; they're wonderful to do business with."
Although Zack, who is single, maintains a busy
schedule - sometimes working 18 hours a day, he says
- he still finds time to study Torah. He was bar
mitzvah at Congregation B'nai Moshe in West
Bloomfield. He and Grushoff study with a few
Lubavitch rabbis who come to the Great Lakes office
at least once a week.
