Tucked away in an unassuming warehouse in Chantilly sit the headquarters for a technology company in the business of destroying computers.
Jeremy Farber, the 29-year-old founder of PC Recycler, has built his business by helping corporations — including some of the nation’s largest defense contractors — guard against the growing threat of identity theft and data breaches by recycling their electronics.
With its boxes and boxes of intricate motherboards, colorful wires, hard drives and CD-ROMs, Farber’s warehouse resembles something between a stolen car parts warehouse and Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory.
“We’re kind of like the middle man. Everything has a place,” he said. “Nothing gets put in a landfill.”
The recycling process includes wiping the hard drive clean using a Department of Defense-designed computer program — which essentially writes over the existing data — and then manually taking apart the computer piece by piece.
Each part is sent off to a recycling plant or any number of locations that can reuse it. For example, all of the toner cartridges get sent to a company in Canada that refills and resells them.
The 5-year-old company got its start almost by accident in 2000 when Farber, who owned an independent cell phone store in New York at the time, met a representative from the Coca-Cola Corp. at an electronics trade show. Farber worked out a deal with the rep to pick up the company’s old electronics and recycle them.
Surprised that a company as big as Coke didn’t already have a recycling program in place, Farber’s business was born.
“I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute. There’s an opportunity here,’” he said. “Coke is one of the most well-known brands in the world, and they couldn’t find anybody to take their stuff? This could be a business.”
But despite the growing concern over identity theft, companies like Farber’s are still relatively few and far between.
“I think companies are attempting to do the right thing in terms of recycling computers,” said Ed Kountz, a senior financial services analyst with Jupiter Research, a firm that focuses on online business. “But it has been hard in the past because you had to send it back to the manufacturer. It hasn’t been the most intuitive experience.”
Farber declined to discuss the financials of the privately held company, but did say PC Recycler’s revenue’s will double this year along with the volume of the electronics they process, which is already in the tons.
“Right now we’re a very healthy company,” Farber said.
“I think the company is [commercially viable] because clearly companies are dealing with increasing amounts of old electronics and you want to make sure the information is gone,” Kountz said. “Plus, many large corporations don’t want to be outed as having dumped into the waste stream. It’s good PR.”
Got an old PC?
» PC Recycler has hundreds of clients from small businesses to Fortune 500 corporations, but once a month it opens its warehouse to the general public.
» Computers, cell phones, televisions and other electronics can be dropped off on Friday, Sept. 8 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or Saturday, Sept. 9 (10 a.m. to 2 p.m.). Much of the recycling is free.
» Visit www.pcrecycler.net or call 800-731-1909 for more information.
