Zagrous Kawarizadeh - From Building PCs to Recycling TVs

[00:00:00] Dominique: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Green Champions. 

[00:00:08] Adam: Thanks for for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:15] Dominique: And I'm always so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire. We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and have done something pretty cool about it.

[00:00:25] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:33] Dominique: Today, Adam and I are joined by Zagrous Kawarizadeh. He is the president of Columbus Micro Systems, which specializes in IT hardware, IT recycling, and managed services.

Zagrous has a unique journey into the world of sustainability, and his dad actually founded this company about 36 years ago. He has so much to share on the topic. He brings a unique background, has a wealth of knowledge on the topic of IT, and this is growing importance as the world technology and data are growing fields.

Today we're gonna approach sustainability with touchpoints on IT, data protection, and how electronic materials actually get recycled if they even do. So, thanks for joining us, Zag.

[00:01:11] Zagrous: Yeah, this is exciting to be here. Thank you both so much for setting this up and I'm excited to dive into the topic.

[00:01:16] Dominique: You wanna kick us off by telling us about your dad and just how you got connected to this world?

[00:01:22] Zagrous: Yeah. 

So, my dad started the company in 1988 in Columbus, Ohio. When he started the company, this is a time where people would open up, you know, yellow Pages and say, "I wanna buy a computer," and he would build the computer. And, that turned from a one man shop to a couple people to now it's a full fledged company. And a fun little story to share is that, Dell, Michael Dell, who started Dell, when he was a student in Texas, was buying floppy discs from our company, and we would send it to him. And so that's the age of the company. Yeah. It's just a crazy, it's just, it's one of those things where I find it very humbling to realize like, oh, like IT equipment is a very, it's not that old. It's, it's really not.

[00:02:03] Adam: Well, and that was before CompuServe, right? CompuServe was in the 90's. 

[00:02:06] Zagrous: Oh, he knows. Yes. 

[00:02:08] Dominique: Just gonna say, I think we should address the elephant in the room that I feel like the third wheel. 

[00:02:13] Adam: You do realize that like CompuServe was like one of the staple companies that kicked off the internet and people actually buying computers and it's headquartered here in Columbus, Ohio. 

[00:02:21] Zagrous: Yep. 

Adam, what's your background? Is it in IT?

[00:02:24] Adam: Yeah. I did. My career started in medical robotics. After that, I went into finance IT, basically working on trading systems. And then I came to work for my dad in 2009, doing retail real estate strategy, which means helping retail brands like Express, DSW, J.Crew, Ralph Lauren, those kind of national brands understand how to open their stores. So we built technology to assist with that I've been in the tech space ever since. 

[00:02:50] Zagrous: Wow.

[00:02:51] Dominique: Well, I do wanna add that you mentioned how young the technology industry even is, and your business has been around for 36 years?

[00:02:59] Zagrous: Yeah. 

[00:02:59] Dominique: How old is the world of tech?

[00:03:01] Zagrous: So the world of tech, I would say like the personal computer, right, was coming around like 1988, the personal computer became more and more commonplace, very expensive. So what's one of those things where there is no HP, there is no Lenovo. There's the IBM, but there's just no staple company that we have today, which is, you know, these large enterprises that dominate the space.

So when the company started for 36 years, our main focus was just, I would say for 20 of those years was building computers. And over that course of time, we started to realize like, "Oh, IT hardware, selling a computer is becoming a commodity". Right now, we're in this room and even the person listening to this could walk in any direction and buy a computer. They could walk 20 minutes in any direction, walk into a Best Buy, a Kroger, a Walmart, Amazon, and they could buy a computer. And during this time, in the early nineties, that wasn't the case. You had to be a specialist. You had to have trained technicians, and they were building computers from scratch.

And so over the course of this 36 years, I would say 20 of those years, we were building computers, period. Nothing else. 

I would say about 15, 18 years ago, my father was the one who started to kind of consider, "We're selling all these computers. What's happening to them when they're done? What happens when the clients wants to buy new ones?"

And that's when he started to kind of really consider the fact that, oh, there's actually, like my father's background is a, he's a double E from OSU. He immigrated here from Iran and right before the revolution and he went to Fresno University in California and he went to OSU and got his master's degree and his focus, his whole life has been circuit boards. He was building circuit boards, now he's desoldering circuit boards. And he was just kind of considering the fact that like these circuit boards, they're reaching end of life. Like why do they have any value? And they do have value, but their value isn't the same as when a consumer's using it, which is like they're getting functionality out of it. 

The value in those circuit boards is actually precious metal value. It's almost, you can consider it as like urban mining is kind of a fun term to use. So the last 15 years or so, we've been really focused on doing a lot more IT recycling. The IT recycling for us has really evolved since I joined the company. So I've been at the organization now for coming up on seven years. I became president of the company three years ago. 

[00:05:06] Dominique: Congrats! 

[00:05:07] Zagrous: Thank you. I appreciate it. I highly encourage you if you wanna challenge to take over a family business. It's awesome. It's awesome. so easy and not challenging. I say that with a smile. Um, it was very challenging to step into an organization. So I have one sibling, I have a sister. But until I joined the organization, did I realize, "Oh, I actually have two siblings." I actually have my sister in this organization. And so, that was a fun period of time, but now having been at the organization and taken over it's, you know, my father's still there. He's a Middle Eastern man, so if I wanted to, I couldn't get him to retire. But, he's still there. He's still tinkering. 

[00:05:42] Dominique: I think we bonded over that on our first call and we like, oh yeah, our parents are so similar.

[00:05:48] Zagrous: Exactly. And so, now what we do is a lot more IT recycling. So the IT recycling for us, when I joined we had a lot of it recycling as just a business. It was not mature. It was something that we were really figuring out. Over the last six years that's changed quite a bit.

One of the things we first did was go to get a R2 certification. So an R2 certification would be comparable to a pharmaceutical company getting FDA approval. So it allows you to suddenly start working with much more serious clients. It allows you to start working with hospitals, insurance companies, law practices, the government. Uh, and that's really opened up a lot of doors for us. And so that really changed what the business looked like for us. 

[00:06:24] Dominique: So before you would maybe approach a big client that had a lot of concerns about like safety, security, and then you had to just be turned away because you didn't have the certifications? 

[00:06:33] Zagrous: Exactly. So, when I joined the company in, you know, six years ago, we were probably recycling in terms of raw material. When I say raw material, I'm including IT recycling, e-waste. I'm including the refurbished equipment material we received was probably about 200 tons, something like that. Now we're doing something close to like 800 tons, and that is a lot of material. 

[00:06:55] Adam: 800 tons of material that you're recycling today. Can you break that down? Like what is IT recycling? What does that look like?

[00:07:01] Zagrous: It's a great question. So IT recycling is, I would say we have a few avenues that we receive material. 

Right now we're receiving a majority of material from large enterprises. So these enterprises could be a school system, this could be a university, it could be a government client that we have. But it could also be individuals. So our doors are open for the public. This is actually a huge cost center for us, but I think it's important that we have that because we've been in Franklin County, we've been off Westerville Road for 36 years. I think it's important that we allow people to recycle the equipment but,

[00:07:30] Dominique: So if I have, like if I get a new phone, I can bring the old phone to your building?

[00:07:34] Zagrous: And we'll take it. Yeah, we'll do data destruction on it for free for clients.

[00:07:37] Dominique: When you work with a large client, they're doing a big overhaul of new computers and they pile up all the old ones and bring 'em over, how does that usually work?

[00:07:45] Zagrous: So that's a relationship, right? So the client, so it's interesting, right? We're talking about IT recycling and how it's a new concept and even newer concept. Is ITAM, right? IT Asset management. So many people are buying so many devices and they don't know how many devices they have right? Because they're constantly adding, they're constantly getting rid of and so you kind of need to be, you know, there needs to be checks and balances in place. So I would say the majority of the material that we get is either walk-in, either our existing clients or some of the contracts that we hold. And that leads to a significant amount of material and a lot of the IT recycling, when I say we're doing about 800 tons, it's not 800 tons of computers. It's 800 tons period. 

So that includes metal, that includes plastic. And we've partnered with different companies in the past because the plastic that we're recycling, some of it is actually has a lot of practicality. ABS plastic is a plastic that is part of LCD screens on computers. And so for many years we were separating ABS plastic and we were donating it to a nonprofit called Form5 Prosthetics.

[00:08:43] Dominique: We know them. 

[00:08:43] Zagrous: Oh, you know them. Aaron? 

[00:08:45] Adam: Aaron is a good friend. 

[00:08:46] Zagrous: Aaron's awesome. 

[00:08:48] Dominique: Shout out to Form5. 

[00:08:49] Zagrous: Yeah. Really. 

[00:08:50] Adam: So Aaron himself has a limb difference and he wanted to kind of democratize the idea that you could be a part of making your own prosthetic and wanted to do it from upcycled material. And that's what they do.

[00:09:01] Zagrous: So, funny story is Aaron and I went to high school together and at the high school we went to, there's a summer project you're supposed to do before you graduate. Mine was being a camp counselor. Aaron's was building a 3D prosthetic limb. Uh, so there, yeah, he's brilliant. He's absolutely brilliant. So, 

[00:09:18] Dominique: Okay. I wanna give our listeners an example of like, I wanna make sure they understand what you're talking about. Like, can you name the kinds of items in our everyday life that would be going to IT recycling? For the average person that might be thinking like, I'm used to the idea of recycling and like, what are these things that don't usually go into the recycling bin that you're collecting that we're used to seeing? Like, so computers, phones.

[00:09:40] Zagrous: So the majority of the material we see that comes in through IT recycling, especially through the general population, but this applies to businesses as well, is computers. So that includes laptops, desktops, we see a lot of hard drives that come in as well. You're seeing stereo equipment, you're seeing TVs, and when I say TVs, I'm talking about flat panel, LCD TVs, but I'm also talking about CRT TVs, the chunky boxes. And we're talking about IT equipment. Those boxes, those chunky TVs are such a hazard. There was no forward thinking prudence when they were developing and designing those TVs, because those CRT TVs stand for cathode-ray tube. Inside of the tube of those TVs is Mercury, which is wrapped around copper coil, which is, okay, mercury's bad, so you need to be careful about not releasing that mercury. And then also the glass that they use on those TVs is leaded glass. 

We actually, at our facility, because of the R2 certification, because of all the compliance pieces around it, we don't even dismantle those devices at our facility. We have to send it to another facility that we've already audited. They're part of the R2 system. But that's an example of a device that it's in a lot of people's basements. It's sitting in a garage somewhere collecting dust, and you don't think about it until you come across it. And suddenly the problem's really in your face. We accept that equipment. It does come with a charge because it's such a hazard to get rid of. so IT recycling, right? 

You're collecting it equipment, computer LCDs, TVs, CRTs, everything, all this different equipment, phones, iPads, cables and anything that's electronic. This does not include household electronics. This does not include things like, you know, a radiator, a microwave, a toaster. We don't accept those things. We don't do appliances. The reason we don't do appliances is that there's, they come in many shapes and sizes. Sometimes they have liquid, sometimes they have heating elements, sometimes they have oil. There are other companies in town. I really encourage people to use the City of Columbus Waste Wizard to find out where to recycle things properly. We obviously are listed there for a lot of the electronic material, but some of the other materials. So think of your fluorescent bulbs, think about your old paint, things of that nature. You can find a solution on the Waste Wizard. The Waste Wizard rocks.

[00:11:46] Dominique: Yeah. And for listeners who are local, there's a Waste Wizard platform within the City of Columbus's website where you can literally type in a thing that you want to find out how to divert and it helps you figure out different options for it. On the episode with Aryeh Alex, we talked about that a little bit in the podcast. Feel free to go find the episode. But if you're not local, there are also other resources online look up like what your options are with each different item. But the Waste Wizard might also be helpful if you wanna look at it outside of our city, and use it to guide your options locally in your area.

[00:12:19] Adam: Fun fact, if you put something in there and it doesn't show up on the Wizard, they actually have somebody behind the scenes who will go and research it for you and get back to you with an answer. 

[00:12:27] Zagrous: Oh, I did not know that. That's cool. I love that. Waste Authorities is what I was gonna say is a really useful tool, just like using a Waste Authority. So there's SWACO here, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio, but there's also like SWANO for Northern Ohio. So depending on where you're at, there oftentimes are waste municipalities or like public waste companies. 

[00:12:44] Adam: So, back to your facility, what happens when you get something that you recycle inside your facility? What does that process look like?

[00:12:50] Zagrous: So when material enters our facility, there's two big questions we have to ask. The first question is, is this data carrying, right? So if it's data carrying, we track it. A lot of companies in IT recycling, and I don't know why this is the case in IT recycling. Treat IT recycling as if it were normal waste, as if it were food or just general waste. But that's not the case because there's data on these devices. 

So when material enters our facility, anything that's data carrying at our facility gets scanned in. So there is a scan of a serial number of a form factor of a device type by our staff. We do that a hundred percent of the time for anything that's data carrying. That's a laptop, that could be a phone, that could be an iPad. That could be a hard drive in SSD. What's not data carrying, projectors, TVs, LCDs, keyboards, and mice. These don't carry data, so we're not concerned. 

Now, obviously with certain things like smart printers, you know, that's becoming something that we have to check for, right? Oh, does this printer have a hard drive? Seriously overkill that a printer has a hard drive or an SSD, but we check for it because we, again, with the R2 certification, we cannot allow this material to leave our facility and for anyone to know where it came from.

 Almost comes to our facility is completely washed of all PII, personal identifiable information, and it goes back into the public and it's reused once more. With that said though, I was just gonna say that this material that enters our facility, the first question we ask is, does it have data? That question gets answered. After that, can it be reused? Is there a market for the device to be reused? So oftentimes we have devices that people bring in and the first thing they tell us, you know, "It's still working. I just, I upgraded my printer." You know, it's, "It's still working. We just, I upgraded my TV Super Bowl." By the way, when it's the Super Bowl at my company that month leading up to it, and then the month leading after it, it's quite funny. The month leading up to it, you're seeing all these looking good TVs coming into our facility and we're recycling them, right? Because people are upgrading their TVs. The month after, depending on whether or not their team won or lost, you see some TVs come in and someone punched a TV. It's a shocking amount of, it's a insane amount of, 

[00:14:51] Dominique: That needs to be unpacked on a broad level.

[00:14:54] Zagrous: The psychology behind the Super Bowl. Yeah. But, but yeah, we see a lot of those devices. 

[00:14:58] Dominique: I wanna dive into that data side a little bit because I think that's so topical around like technology growth and the idea that we just have more and more data everywhere we turn. 

Can you just share like how you think about your industry when the world technology is growing and data privacy is more important, and just the data we have across the board is changing?

[00:15:21] Zagrous: Yeah. And so, I have a background in cybersecurity. And so when I joined the company, a lot of, again, with IT recycling, IT recycling is considered this waste stream, but it's not. You have to focus on the fact that there is data on these devices and the devices need to be tracked and the data needs to be wiped.

So, for example, within our R2 certification, we have a few ways that we get rid of data. So we receive the device, we scan in the device. So the client automatically knows, "Hey, this hard drive arrived at our facility." They can kind of take a breath of relief, right? The fact that the device is now at our facility.

But the other element of that story though is that, okay, now what happens? Now what happens to the data that's at our facility? Will we wipe it? And then once we wipe it, that could be logical wiping. So we use software to wipe the devices and that's basically just part what's called partitioning the drive where you just overwrite on top of the data that's already there. Or the other option, which is physical destruction. And physical destruction, you are physically destroying the device. But what we do is every day, one of our technicians will go out and pick a random device and just check it for data, a device that's already been wiped. And we'll constantly be doing this throughout the year. And if we're able to get data from it, we have a failure, we have a leak. There's been a problem. That's never happened before. And again, it's everything to do with the fact that this is all a process driven facility, right? With IT recycling, you can't allow a hard drive to leave your facility, a device to leave your facility with any data on it.

Which can you, for those who would listen and be like, "Who cares? Why would it matter?" Can you give us some examples of why it's so important that data gets wiped?

There's an example from 2008, I think it was 2008 or 2010. Like Britney Spears was having like a mental health crisis. She was admitted to UCLA hospital and custodial staff at UCLA hospital we're like, "Oh my gosh, Britney Spears is in the hospital. We need to go see why is she here. We need to go look in her health records." And so people in the custodial staff who have no medical background looked into her health records. Each one of the people that looked it up, it resulted in like a million dollar fine for the UCLA hospital because that's a person's right to have their information, their health information, private. And so why is it important if you're just dropping off your laptop and you haven't wiped the data and you don't have a password and you're dropping your laptop off at just some facility? That's a risk. That's the same thing as you putting your social security number on the side of your car and being like, this is my date of birth and this is my mother's maiden name. And

[00:17:36] Dominique: That's a great analogy. 

[00:17:38] Zagrous: It's the same exact thing. And so when people think about data, there's such a risk associated with it. 

But I do think for an individual versus a business, there's different weight to why it's important to get rid of your data. For the individual, it's the inconvenience and also the possible hazard that it could be. For the business, it's punitive damages. It's also financial damages to an institution that could potentially be the shutting down of an institution if you have a HIPAA violation or if you've, you know, you've released a certain amount of information to the public. 

And there's multiple examples of fines happening in the multiple millions of millions of dollars for banks that have just recycled their hard drives in the back of a truck, and they don't know who took them. They don't know where the devices went. They have no chain of custody. They have no release of liability. There's examples of that, specifically Morgan Stanley, and that's a multiple million dollar fine. I mean, the story is they had IT recycling happen. They sold their material, they got rid of their material with a facility, an IT recycling facility. The IT recycling facility took the material, didn't even scan it in, didn't do anything and sold it before it arrived. And then now what? Now what happens to all of that sensitive data? Where does it go? Who has it? No idea. It's a multiple million dollar fine. 

[00:18:49] Dominique: Yeah. That makes me anxious to think about. 

[00:18:51] Zagrous: Yeah. 

[00:18:51] Adam: Things that keep you up at night. Yeah. But we have solutions. 

So you mentioned things come into the facility, you scan them in, you say, "Hey, is this reusable? Can you wipe the data and put it back out to the market?" What happens if it's not reusable?

[00:19:08] Zagrous: If it's not reusable and we're receiving the material, what we do is that, that's where IT recycling happens, right? That's where we're suddenly looking at the material and we're deciding, okay, what is this thing? What is this device? What is it made out of? Is it made out of mostly plastic? Steel? Okay, what else? It's got cables inside of it. Okay, what else? It has a circuit board. Okay, what else? Maybe it has a zinc board. Suddenly you start talking about precious metal content and that's where that term I used earlier, urban mining comes into play where you're no longer looking at the material in terms of like the monetary value of this piece of equipment is in its fact that it can be reused, but in the fact that no, there's precious metal here 

You know, going a bit specific into our business, we are focused on both the refurbishment, the secondary market of those devices, but we're also focused on the E-waste. And the E-waste for us is, you know, we're taking cables and we're separating out the PVC and the PE from the cable and getting the copper. And instead, before we were taking that material and we were sending it to companies. 

So in, in our business, downstream means the person that you send the material to.

So everyone in our downstream, they've been audited. They probably don't love when I give them phone calls 'cause I have a million questions. But they've gone through a really stringent process with us to make sure that the material we're sending them isn't ending up in a prison. It's not ending up in a third world country. It's not ending up in anywhere where they use child labor. And that's by the way, the beginning of a very long laundry list of what happens to the material we send them. But before we were taking cables and we were separating them and making sure that the cables were the correct size, we were sending them to a neighboring state.

Now what we do with that material is we have through a grant with the Ohio EPA in SWACO, we take that material and we have a cable granulator, and we actually take those cables, separate the plastic and the copper out. And that copper, instead of going to a neighboring state, now goes through a facility in Newark, Ohio. It's 40 minutes away from where we are right now. And they use it in a foundry, they use it in a copper mill and all that copper stays now in the state of Ohio. 

[00:21:08] Dominique: Before we wrap this episode, I really wanna ask you like why you care about this? I mean, you've shared that your dad's part of this company and there has been just like it's been part of your family. You mentioned that you have a background in cybersecurity. But like, what makes you so thrilled to be part of this solution? Like what keeps you driven about doing this work?

[00:21:28] Zagrous: That's a great question. I don't think I've actually been ever asked that. I don't think I've asked myself that question. 

Um, I think the reason why I am so passionate about this is I like solving problems. And this is a problem. And there's not enough people trying to solve the problem. And that's what I like about it. I feel like we're contributing to a solution at Columbus Micro Systems. I feel like we're all trying to make sure that our clients can go to sleep at night with the fact that their data's not out in the wild. The fact that there are people that buy computers from us, refurbish computers from us, and that's the first computer they've ever purchased, and now they can actually, you know, attend online school. They can do their job, they can FaceTime a parent. 

[00:22:09] Dominique: I'm excited to get into some of the accessibility pieces that I know you're passionate about on the next 

[00:22:13] Zagrous: episode. 

Yeah. And so for me it's about solving a problem.

[00:22:15] Dominique: That's awesome.

[00:22:16] Adam: I love it. I feel like we've covered so much today, just, you know, talking about Columbus Micro Systems and what it means to recycle goods, like what happens when they come in your door. This whole topic around data security and being able to track that, but also different routes that materials go. So depending on the quantity and the material, whether you recycle it or find another secondary market for it. As well as this idea that the more you can keep things in the state or find local solutions for recycling, you know, that's just much better for the environment Yeah, and I also just think we talk so much about data and new devices and getting the next thing, and AI is like only getting more and more topical around like the amount of data that were, you know, running through our systems. I just think we don't often talk about the hardware and what happens to the old device, How could people find out more about Columbus Micro Systems and support the work that you're doing?

[00:23:11] Zagrous: People are able to go to our website at columbusmicro.com. as well as physically come into our business, we're open nine to five Monday through Friday. And people are able to bring in IT recycling. and if they have any questions, I encourage them to call us. our information's listed on our website at columbusmicro.com.

[00:23:29] Dominique: Thanks for the work that you're doing for chatting with us today. 

[00:23:32] Zagrous: it's my pleasure. Thanks guys.

[00:23:33] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, change you really episodes at in the fight against climate change. 

[00:23:44] Dominique: You can our episodes at thegreenchampions.com

If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach on our website at thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik Thanks for listening to Green Champions.

We'll be digging into the second part of Zag's Story, in our next episode.

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