Luminous electronics recycling.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Company overview

INITIAL LIGHT BULB:

Steve Fuelberth was an engineer for UPS in Kansas City, Mo., before getting into the waste industry with BFI in Colorado in 1998. He then bounced around the Southwest, working waste- and recycling-related positions in Arizona and Texas before returning to Denver in 2004 to launch Luminous Electronic Recycling.

"It was time to get out of the corporate world and get back to where I wanted to put this business, which was in Colorado," he said.

The initial Luminous business plan centered on recycling mercury-laden fluorescent lamps, but he found a better business model recycling electronics of all kinds. "There's more available, and there's better growth potential so I put electronics in the forefront, and lamps became secondary," Fuelberth said.

Fuelberth is president and CEO of Luminous, which today has about 20 employees and is in the process of relocating from a relatively small 11,000-square-foot Denver plant to a 112,000-square-foot facility in Aurora. Luminous' sales grew exponentially in the past year, he said.

IN A NUTSHELL:

For a fee, Luminous recycles electronics of all kinds, relieving customers of liability of losing sensitive data or valuable intellectual property (or befouling the environment) when retiring outdated technology, and fully documents the process.

"It's a cheap insurance policy," Fuelberth said. "But it's also the environmentally correct thing to do."

While most recyclers focus on just one type or era of technology, Luminous will recycle anything, especially electronics with no market value.

"The foundation of my organization is handling that old 286 computer," Fuelberth said. "Technology is getting so cheap anymore, fewer and fewer people are looking for a used PC."

He described three tiers of electronics recycling: Tier one, you refurbish the computer (or other electronic device) and resell it. (Luminous usually wholesales the refurbished product, but in some cases retails it via eBay.) Tier two, you take it apart and sell it piece by piece and recycle whatever the market doesn't want. Tier three, you destroy the electronics--if they have no value or if there are liability issues--and wholesale the scrap as copper- or aluminum-bearing material to a growing international market.

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"The best way to recycle is to reuse, but we don't tell our customers they have to do that," noted Fuelberth, citing a company goal of recycling 3 million pounds of electronic scrap in 2007. "The...