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SARAH BATES: When the founder of the cellphone recycling
company, ecoATM, recently came to town, I couldn't pass up the
opportunity to talk with him about the value of science-based
business. The NSF's Small Business Innovation Research
program gave start-up funding to ecoATM in 2011 because it turns
out, it takes a lot of high-tech tools to turn old electronics
into a commercial enterprise that helps save the environment.
I'm Sarah Bates. I sat down with entrepreneur and ecoATM founder,
Mark Bowles, to learn more about the innovation behind the kiosks
that are making a big difference in the world. It's a big
problem when people don't recycle their phone, right?
Because there's arsenic and lead and all kinds of that
stuff in there?
MARK BOWLES: Yeah. So there's two sides of it and then the
easy side that everybody thinks about is that the electronics
end up in the landfill, you know, they break down eventually
and some of them have some pretty nasty stuff that can get
into the water table. It takes hundreds of years but it's not
good stuff. And so keeping them out of landfills is one thing
but I think the bigger side of it is the creating of the mobile
phone. So when you throw this thing out after you're tired of
your iPhone after 18 months or whatever and you get a new one,
that phone still has life in it, maybe two or three lives in it
and there's people that want that and so if you can take it
and put it in the hands of the next guy and the next guy then
that stops the creation of another phone from scratch. And
then if you take the end-of-life ones, let's say it's done and
it's end-of-life and then you reclaim the metal from that then
you don't have to mine that from the ground.
SARAH BATES: And you did get a Small Business Innovation
Research grant from National Science Foundation?
MARK BOWLES: I did.
SARAH BATES: Why is this a project that involved
innovation? What is the kind of the fundamental research behind
the device itself?
MARK BOWLES: So it's an interesting machine vision
problem. We have cameras that look at the phones. Machine
vision is usually looking for, it's not like this, like looking
at parts going down a production line and it's looking for the
errors, right? A lot of these phones are becoming rectangular
black sheets of glass without a lot of different say features,
right? They're very similar.
Machine vision generally hadn't been applied to
a problem where there's four or five or six thousand different
things that look pretty similar but you have to identify each
one separately in a big three-dimensional database and
then you have to not only identify them, you've got to in
and grade them, how is it broken and how broken is it. And so I
had a little bit of background in facial recognition technology
and I thought we could apply it to this.
SARAH BATES: Yeah, there's a lot of steps involved in having
the machine scan the device and making sure that it works and
making sure - but you accept all cell phones essentially?
MARK BOWLES: Yeah, we take them all. If we can identify it as a
phone, if you put a banana in, we're not going to take that.
SARAH BATES: But some phones are worth, not very much, right?
MARK BOWLES: Not very much.
SARAH BATES: They're very much –
MARK BOWLES: The end of life.
SARAH BATES: So this is what we call a classic flip-phone.
MARK BOWLES: That is a classic - that's a good word.
SARAH BATES: Yeah. So this would probably be worth at
least a dollar?
MARK BOWLES: It will be worth a dollar. We will pay a dollar for
it. We can sell it for about a dollar, maybe $1.25 to the
smelter that's going to reclaim it. By the time we process it
and ship it, we lose a few dollars on those but it's part
of our brand promise is to take those back and we'd rather you
give them to us than to put them in the landfill.
SARAH BATES: So I can see the use of ecoATM
with environmental reasons.
MARK BOWLES: Yeah. So the environment wins, right? The
person with the junk in their drawer that will probably end in
a landfill, they win because they get some money. The
retailer wins because they bring the phones in and they turn it
into cash magically in our machine and then most of that is
spent right back in the store and then the person
downstream wins because they get a phone that they may not be
able afford otherwise. And ecoATM wins, of course, we make
some money in the process.
SARAH BATES: You talked about this a little bit earlier but
kind of why is it important for an agency like NSF to give you
that seal of approval?
MARK BOWLES: The fact that we got through the NSF's filter and
were selected as a grantee was a real nice, credibility begets
more credibility, and so a lot of times when you're trying to
raise money or get the attention of customers or anybody having
some baseline credibility, the NSF brand carries
a lot of weight.
SARAH BATES: So you started out as a really small company though
and as a start-up?
MARK BOWLES: Yeah, we started as an idea of a coffee shop.
SARAH BATES: Right. And now, you're how many strong and –
MARK BOWLES: Today, there's over 270 employees direct, maybe
another 100 indirect and NSF helped in that process and it's
created a lot of jobs and a lot of success.
SARAH BATES: It was just a few years after your initial SBIR
that you were acquired by, it is an acquisition or was it –
MARK BOWLES: It was an acquisition. Outerwall, the
company that bought us in July last year for
$350 million in cash.
SARAH BATES: Wow.
MARK BOWLES: And so we're part of the family now.
SARAH BATES: I'm going to visit an ecoATM and get my dollar.
MARK BOWLES: All right. There you go.
SARAH BATES: Although it's worth at least a dollar and one
cent, I think. Thank you for coming by.
MARK BOWLES: You're welcome.
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