When you first talk to Steve on the phone, you get a strong
sense of his entrepreneurial drive. In just three and half years he has gone
from an empty 50,000 square foot warehouse in
Jacksonville, Texas with two employees to a service area that stretches across nine
states and a second location in Miami Florida. With 80 employees STS is not slowing down anytime
soon.
Below are some excerpts from my interview with Steve:
Tell me about how you
got started?
Steve: I had experience running several scrap yards and wanted to get into
recycling. When someone came along and expressed an interest in buying my
business I offered him a price I thought would scare him off and he took it!
Having sold my business I was
elected as the Commissioner of Precinct 2 for Cherokee County and with the need to
subsidize my salary felt like I had a good opportunity to get into recycling.
A good friend of mine was dabbling in electronic recycling and I began
to read up on it and found out that only 25% of the electronics disposed of in
the U.S. are being recycled. Added to that, there will be more electronics
produced in the next five years than were produced between 1980 and today.
With those kinds of trends in place I felt like this was an industry that
wasn’t going away anytime soon.
Initially, I started on the scrap side of business breaking down
components and selling them to be remanufactured. That ultimately led to where
STS is today where we not only recycle electronics but also refurbish and sell
them. In fact the retail side of our business is about as big as the recycling
side of the business.
How did you go about learning
how to recycle electronic devises?
Steve: I was self-taught for the most part and spent a
lot of time learning about the industry requirements. I also hired the right
people who knew more about it than I did.
Gradually,
as the company grew we learned from what we were doing as we went along. Today, STS
has a home for about 99% of everything that comes in from cardboard and plastic
packaging to motherboards. What we don’t recycle or refurbish we can find a
buyer for.
I
also made sure we got the Responsible Recycling Practices (R2) certification
which is one of only two certifications accredited by the EPA. Although there are no regulations
requiring this certification, I felt like it was a responsible approach for the company to
take. We are audited diligently throughout the year and they check everything
from A to Z including the companies
which are downstream in our supply chain to make sure nothing we recycle ends
up in a river or landfill anywhere in the world.
What are some key moments that you remember
in the life of your company?
Steve:
One would have to be when I found a
50,000 square foot building in Jacksonville, Texas that became our first location.
It was trashed out and had formerly been a plastic recycling plant. I remember
walking in there thinking, this place is huge.
Our
first customer was a guy I knew who had a computer business and called me to pick up a load of
electronics he had been storing and wanted to get rid of. A cousin and I went
and picked up the load in my truck and trailer and I can still remember driving
into the warehouse and being able to turn around inside. As it turned out we
needed the space as STS has doubled every year we have been in business.
Another
key moment was deciding to diversify and build up the retail side of the
business. I was in the scrap business during the financial crisis in 2008 and
watched prices go from $10 per 100 pounds of scrap to $1 per 100 pounds of scrap in a year. Scrap prices move in sync
with commodity prices so that side of the business moves up and down fairly
frequently. The retail side of the business is more consistent as we sell
refurbished products across the U.S. which generates cash flow for our local
operation. In a way we recycle everything, just not the money!
With data security
being in the news a lot recently, what does your company do to ensure any
private information on the devices you recycle is destroyed?
Steve: Each truck is connected to a tracking system that
monitors what we pick up from the time we receive it to the time it arrives at our facility. This
allows STS to maintain an unbroken chain of custody while the device is under
our control all the way through the recycling process. Once the data is destroyed and a device has been
recycled we issue a certificate of destruction showing the data has been
destroyed.
The FBI, Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshalls are some of the
clients who have used us for data destruction and electronic recycling as well
as a number of police and sheriff departments because of the safeguards we have
in place.
In terms of growth
where do you think STS will be in the next 3-5 years?
Steve: Based on our current growth rate I think we will
probably triple in size over the next five years. I got into the industry at a
good time and have been able to look at what other recyclers are doing and
improve on it. From an industry perspective the growth is robust with
electronic recycling going from a $5 billion dollar a year industry just a few
years ago to an over $20 billion a year industry today.
This industry has to grow otherwise the growth in electronics is going
to pollute the world. Where we stand today, electronic waste streams are the
fastest growing waste streams in the world.
When you are not
working as the CEO of STS or as County Commissioner what do you do for fun?
Steve: I live in Rusk, which is the county seat for
Cherokee County and is a small town of 6,000 people about 45 minutes south of
Tyler. With a big family (six kids), my parents, two sisters and a brother all
living within about a five mile radius I spend a lot of time going to baseball
games and just enjoying participating in family activities.
To watch a KYTX Channel 19 story about STS Recycling's click here
