On the Other End of the Line
(Crain's) — For each of America's 208 million cell phone subscribers, there is a high-tech device that one day will be trash.
Intercepting it before it reaches a landfill is Travis Griggs' new job. Transforming it into something saleable is his goal.
Mr. Griggs, 34, is the new wireless recycling programs director at Intercon Solutions Inc. The electronics recycling company in Chicago Heights wants to boost its wireless intake, and hired Mr. Griggs to do it.
With the attention paid to new versions of mobile devices, it's easy to forget that their obsolete predecessors enter the waste stream.
Sometimes they are toxic: until recently, phones contained lead solder, says Craig Boswell, a wireless committee leader at the International Assn. of Electronics Recyclers.
Mr. Griggs, the former owner of an electronics store in south suburban Bradley called Worldwide Wireless, has watched the evolution of mobile technology first hand. When he started at the store five years ago, he was selling phones shaped like bricks from Cellular One. "When those first flip phones came out, that was the coolest thing ever. And now nobody would take one of those if you give it to them," he says.
Every month, trucks back up at Intercon and leave behind 40,000 pounds of mobile phones, chargers and other consumer gadgets, says Brian Brundage, Intercon's CEO and Mr. Griggs' boss. It's still a fraction of the minimum 500,000 pounds of electronics Intercon recycles monthly.
With cellphone use growing, there's an ever-expanding supply for companies like Intercon. But Mr. Griggs sees a bigger opportunity in heftier stuff - switches and other equipment that cell phone companies use to run a network.
"I'm really trying to focus more on the larger, backbone equipment," he says. "The stuff that people really don't see or know is even there."
The U.S. had 183,689 cell sites last year, a 700% increase over 1995, when there were 22,663 sites, according to CTIA-The Wireless Assn. In the same period, mobile phone subscribers grew to 207.9 million from 33.7 million.
When Sprint Nextel Corp. phases out its iDen wireless standard several years from now, Mr. Griggs foresees a huge amount of electronics equipment that will need recycling. "We are working on that," he says.
Electronics recycling is a crowded industry, though, and there's no certainty Intercon will be able to pick off major chunks of business from the big players.
Mr. Griggs says an Intercon selling point is that it won't resell phones or other equipment into the second-hand market. Instead, every piece of electronics is guaranteed to be "demanufactured," meaning it's returned to the basic components of glass, rubber, plastic, or metal and then sold off as raw material for other manufacturers.
Suppliers - such as wireless companies collecting old phones in store recycling bins - are assured of no environmental liability. No materials wind up in landfills or on the shores of Third World countries.
"It's literally taken apart by hand. They'll take the screws out and separate the LCD screens, keypads, the boards - it's broken down into like material," he says.
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