"Turning E-Waste Into Greenbacks" San Jose Mercury News - April 22, 2005

By Karl Schoenberger
Mercury News

Before hatching the idea for his new start-up GreenCitizen, James Kao considered himself a "serial entrepreneur.'' A veteran of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, Kao went off on his own in 1994 and founded three Silicon Valley companies, parlaying his expertise in database analysis and supply chain management into success.

Now he's betting on trash. Electronic trash.

Kao, 46, said he had an epiphany of sorts in 2002 when he read news articles about the scourge of hazardous electronic waste that was piling up fast in people's basements -- or getting dumped in China in a new kind of environmental disaster.

A Taiwan native with an undergraduate degree in computer science and an MBA from UCLA, Kao traveled to Shanghai and Europe to investigate the problem of e-waste recycling. Then he hit on the idea to do something important in his own back yard -- and make money at the same time. GreenCitizen was born, which despite its greeny name is not a non-profit.

"It occurred to me that the biggest problem in e-waste recycling was in the first mile, the logistical step from customer to the upstream flow of material,'' Kao said. "There's a patchwork of systems out there, from municipal haulers to mail-in programs, that are not integrated and should be if this is going to work efficiently.''

GreenCitizen's first mile is a convenient collection center for used and unwanted electronic goods right behind an electronics mega-store on Park Boulevard in Palo Alto. Kao and his five GreenCitizen employees will host a grand opening today, with Palo Alto Mayor Jim Burch cutting the ceremonial ribbon at 10 a.m. (See www.greencitizen.com.)

Under the new recycling law that went into effect at the beginning of the year, GreenCitizen will collect televisions and computer monitors bought in-state for free, and then receive compensation after passing them up the chain to state-certified recycling companies.

There are fees for other computer junk. Dropping off a PC system, including the CPU, monitor and keyboard, will cost you $12. Laptops will set you back $10. Inkjet printers are $4. If you bought your TV or monitor out of state, that costs $20 to drop off because it's not covered under the California Electronics Recycling Act.

What makes GreenCitizen unique, Kao says, is its plan to log the serial numbers of all the items it collects, which theoretically would allow the company "accountability'' in tracking the material as it travels its way up the "safe and proper'' recycling supply chain.