Michael Caulfield stood in the vast warehouse, surrounded by boxes of old electronics parts.
“It’s like the miner trying to get gold out of the water,” said Caulfield, vice president of sales for E-Structors. “Everything, at the end of the day, in some way shape or form, we’re recycling it.”
The “e-scrap recycling” business has grown in recent years, as has E-Structors. The firm, founded in 2003 by Julie and Michael Keough, recently moved to a new 95,000-square-foot facility in Howard County, increasing operating capacity by nearly 74,000 square feet. In the past year, the company has grown from 22 to 59 employees.
The business receives about 1 million pounds of electronic waste and an additional 500,000 pounds of paper waste per month from customers throughout the mid-Atlantic.
“We expect that number to get as high as 4 million pounds [of received materials per month] in the next two years,” Caulfield said.
About 2.6 million tons of e-scrap was generated in the United States in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and just 12.6 percent was recycled. With annual revenues in excess of $3 million, E-Structors is looking for even bigger things in the future.
“We help companies go ‘green’ and do it in a secure and responsible manner,” said Michael Keough, company president. “Everybody knows green. It’s a very fashionable word, but we’ve been helping companies go green since 1996.”
Before establishing E-Structors, Keough in 1996 founded Integrated Waste Analysts, a management service company that provides recycling management programs to customers throughout the United States.
E-Structors recycles everything — computers, hard drives, televisions, stereos, cell phones and more. The company disables the old electronics, then a “monster shredder” tears through what remains and separates the parts into valuable plastics and precious metals like gold, silver and copper.
Additionally, the company helps customers dispose of sensitive personal and business data in a secure manner, shredding and destroying documents and hard drives.
Howard County Executive Ken Ulman said E-Structors is the model of a successful green business.
“It’s becoming more and more clear that we can do more for the environment and grow jobs at the same time,” Ulman said.
TOP HONORS
E-Structors in September was listed as one of Secure Destruction Business magazine’s top electronic scrap recyclers in the United States and Canada.
