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Out with the Old, in with the Environment

date:

3/1/2007

Innovations having a positive effect on business, industry or community.

Ellicott City, MD - Although 39-year-old Michael S. Keough’s Integrated Waste Analysts Inc. had been handling companies’ recycling needs for years, computers were not part of the package. That changed in 2003, when Keough and his wife and CEO, Julie, spun off E-Structors Inc.

“We kept hearing from our clients that they needed a way to safely remove all confidential data from their out-of-date computers, as well as an environmentally acceptable way to dispose of them,” said Keough, the company’s president.

Realizing it was utterly impractical to take computers apart manually due to the sheer magnitude of the task, the couple spent $1 million to develop a system that would remove and destroy sensitive data, then “shred” and sort the computer’s plastic, ferrous steel and remaining metal parts. Borrowing enough money was, as Keough put it, “the biggest challenge,” but fortuitously, they were successful.

No one would argue that computers have revolutionized the way Americans live and work. But when it comes time to upgrade electronic equipment, the picture isn’t so pretty: According to the National Safety Council, only 11 percent of the millions and millions of obsolete computers will be recycled in this country.

Corporations and individuals pay the company for this service, and once the computers have been destroyed, E-Structors sells the plastic, steel and assorted metals to those who can reuse them, thus keeping the heavy metals out of landfills.

Keough was hardly new to the waste removal business. His father — the person he professes to admire most — was running his own document destruction company more than 40 years ago. After picking up a bachelor of general studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, Keough pretty much worked in waste management — at Browning-Ferris Industries and Weyerhauser Co. — before setting out in 1997 to set up Integrated Waste Analysts.

The potential for E-Structors’ growth seems limitless: Outmoded electronic equipment is legion in this country. While Keough declined to divulge sales figures, he notes than in E-Structor’s first six months in business, some 200 tons of electronic waste — think lead and mercury — were diverted away from this area’s waste stream.

Keough, a father of four, was written up in an article “The Rites of Spring: Off to Washington in Search of Green Technology” (www.analogzone.com/grnrept11.htm), and this past July, E-Structors was featured on WMAR-TV’s “Kinderman Show,” explaining to children how to recycle electronic waste.

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Out with the Old, in with the Environment

Integrated Waste Analysts, Inc.