Initial light bulb.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TECH STARTUP

COMPANY

ANEW GREEN INC.

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: After years with IBM's high-end printing division (now Ricoh Infoprint Solutions), Dennis Estabrooks and Eric Jepsen hung their own shingle on a consulting shop, epHub, in 2002.

Consulting for the same market - high-end, high-speed laser printers used primarily by insurance companies and banks to print anything with private information - "We discovered a huge amount of waste being tossed in landfills," Jepsen says. "These printers are fundamentally inefficient. You may put in 100 pounds of toner in a machine and only 80 pounds gets printed."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Sensing a market opportunity, Jepsen and Estabrooks developed a recycling process for the staggering amount of wasted toner and launched Anew Green in 2006. Now 10 employees strong, the company's sales have nearly doubled every year since its launch.

IN A NUTSHELL: Anew Green's patented process cleans foreign particles from dry toner so it can be reused. "It's mixed with paper dust and chads - a bunch of junk," says Jepsen, who serves as the company's president. (Estabrooks is CEO.) "But over 90 percent of it is usable toner."

The company arranges delivery of full pallets of toner from print shops around the U.S. and Canada to its Longmont facility, where a "trade secret" process is employed to filter out the unwanted debris. Afterward, Anew Green is able to use the exact same packaging to ship clean toner to customers.

"There are a lot of benefits," Jepsen says. "If you recycle one pound of toner, that's one pound of toner you didn't have to create from raw materials. Recycled toner has as much brand equity as recycled paper."

The long-term plan is to move into recycling ink and toner from mid-range printers as well as other office waste such as shredded paper. "The mid-range market is larger but more labor-intensive," Jepsen says. "We'll eventually get down there, but for now we're focused on the high end."

Before signing on with Anew Green, "We had been...