GreenDisk, a Sammamish Business, Offers Convenient Way to Dispose of 'Technotrash'

Finding a greener and cleaner way to dispose of electronic waste can be a dilemma.

The Puget Sound has recycling centers that will accept hardware such as computers and monitors (click to find a recycling centers in King County). But for some consumers, disposing of CDs, floppies, DATs can be a problem because of the sensitive information – e.g., family photos, passwords, personal information – that they contain.

David Beschen’s Sammamish company, GreenDisk, has addressed that issue for consumers and for large companies for 18 years. Not only does it destroy the information on the disk, but it also will recycle many of the products.

GreenDisk’s products have evolved as technology has changed, and the company has created products with a “eat what you kill” philosophy – creating usable goods from the recycled material collected, Beschen, the company’s founder and CEO, said.

“It’s an aggressive form of closed-loop manufacturing,” he said.

GreenDisk soon will produce DVD cases and will focus more on recycled consumer products, Beschen said.

The “green” in GreenDisk is taken very seriously, Beschen said, who lives in the Issaquah Highlands.

Beschen, a former chief of corporate communications for Microsoft, said he originally started the company to help technology companies ensure that intellectual property was properly disposed and destroyed as they came out with new products.

“They loved it,” Beschen said.

GreenDisk expanded to serve the movie industry, including erasing and recycling video tapes.

Not only do companies with truckloads of materials want such services, but home computer users were eager for ways to dispose of used or obsolete media, he said.

Disks and smaller data storage media are “the lowest value but the most difficult to deal with,” Beschen said.

He added that many people don’t realize that if you simply throw your used floppy disks and CD-RWs away, they are considered published in the public domain.

So if someone retrieves it from a trash can or landfill, that person has the legal right to use whatever information is on the disk, provided they don’t use it to commit a crime, he said.

Computer users can mail their e-waste to GreenDisk in their own boxes, or they can can order a box, called a “Technotrash can,”  from the company’s website www.GreenDisk.com. Once the box is filled with electronic media, the box can be picked up shipped to GreenDisk’s nearest processing center, which will destroy the electronic media.

Once the intellectual property is destroyed, the physical material is sent for recycling or reuse, and the customer is sent a disposal audit and record of physical custody of the materials, Beschen said.

The company’s main fulfillment center is in Columbus, Mo., allowing the boxes to be shipped virtually anywhere in the country within a couple of days.

Though the company is small—just five employees, Beschen said—it outsources everything to nonprofit companies that process the materials, such as former contractor Seattle-based nonprofit Lighthouse for the Blind for a period of time.

Beschen said the company averages between $2 million and $3 million in revenue each year. It has about 20,000 smaller customers, largely individual consumers, and about two hundred corporate customers, Beschen said.