A Word About Recycling with Ollie Maier

From the recent Resource Recycling newsletter, I found two recycling companies are expanding; one in Texas and the other in Minnesota.

First to Texas, Smart Metals Recycling (SMR Worldwide) has opened its third processing site. It is the first of several additional locations planned to come online in the next few years.

The Statesville, North Carolina-headquartered ITAD firm (Information Technology Asset Disposition) opened the 20,000-squarefoot Dallas location on July 1. Although smaller than its 100,000-square-foot Statesville facility and its 60,000-square -foot Woodland, California plant, it is designed to serve some customers better at a lower cost because of trucking charges.

The Dallas site will provide all the same services as the other locations, except it won’t have a large-scale shredding capability. The Dallas plant is designed to handle up to 4 million pounds per month, and when needed, it can be expanded.

While the Dallas facility is primarily aimed at remarketing and redeploying information technology assets, it can also dismantle devices. It is the first of several planned to come online in the next few years.

These company plans include three more locations in the Americas by 2021, plus up to five locations elsewhere in the world by 2023. They recently appeared for the first time on a list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private U.S. companies, its 2018 revenue of $25.1 million was an increase of 265% over the past three years.

Now to Minnesota — where I am currently spending the summer. I found the Integrated Recycling Technologies (IRT) company is moving into a facility more than five times the size of the company’s current Minnesota location as it expands. The move will take it from a 42,000-square-foot facility to a 230,000-square-foot building in St. Cloud. Both my wife and I grew up within 20 miles of St Cloud.

Although the move comes much before the company’s planned expansion in five years, its business growth moved that schedule up a few years. The company is expected to increase its processing capacity within the next 18 months from 32 million pounds per year to between 80 million and 100 million pounds per year.

In its new facility, employees will have additional workspace to process incoming devices. It will also allow more room for all processing operations which will help to remove any bottlenecks. While purchasing over 40 million pounds of electronics to process within the next year, it is expecting overall sales to be greater than $50 million.

And if a device can’t be reused because of its age or condition, the company will shred it and sell its commodity content.

“With our unique ability to shred things and use our metallurgical lab on-site, we’re able to know intrinsic values of things,” a company spokesperson said.

The company is also concentrating on data destruction on incoming devices. Since this is very important to customers, especially large corporations, the company plans to use a software system that allows clients to monitor the status of their devices at any stage in the asset disposition process.

Enough about expansions for today.

So till next week, do have a safe and enjoyable one...

--Ollie is a local citizen concerned with the environment and helping others. A retired Air Force fighter and instructor pilot, he is a graduate of Leadership San Marcos and received his degrees at Texas State University where he worked on staff before totally retiring. For questions or comments, he invites you to call him at 512-353-7432 or email omaier@txstate.edu.