David Martinek measures the purity of gold jewelry at Recycle Frog.
Look inside any garage in Ottawa and aside from the toolboxes and skates you’ll probably find some old electronics, such as broken speakers, dusty VHS players, or brick-sized cell phones.
One Centretown company is hoping to tap into this forgotten treasure trove by paying Ottawa residents to recycle their old electronics.
Recycle Frog, located in the World Exchange Plaza, got its start dealing with more traditional kinds of treasure – gold and other precious metals.
The company pays customers for old, unwanted watches or necklaces, and then sends the gold to a refinery where it is melted down and recycled into new watches and necklaces by jewellery companies.
But there’s a reason the company’s name isn’t Recycle Gold, says co-founder David Martinek.
He wants the company to branch out beyond recycling old jewellery, and start accepting old electronics.
The company hopes to “blow the doors open” on the new venture in about six months, says Martinek.
Despite the eco-friendly image the company name evokes, Recycle Frog isn’t relying on the green conscience of customers to bring in their recyclable goods.
Just like in the gold-recycling business, the company wants to offer customers an added incentive for hauling in their belongings.
Martinek says the business is talking to corporations and different levels of government, in hopes of setting up a partnership “to allow us to say to the customer, ‘you’re doing something great for the environment, you know that, but here’s also a gift card for 25 dollars to say thank you from us.’ ”
The City of Ottawa doesn’t pick up electronics with the rest of the recycling, which Martinek hopes will bode well for Recycle Frog’s business plan.
But the company is not the only player vying to collect the city’s old computers and televisions. Ontario Electronic Stewardship (OES), a provincial program that encourages electronic recycling, has 55 affiliated collection sites in Ottawa.
If Recycle Frog succeeds, it will be the first company in Ottawa to offer a financial incentive to customers who bring in their electronic junk.
Toronto’s Shift Recycling started offering cash incentives to customers at a rate of one cent per pound of electronics in October 2010.
It may not seem like much, says president Gary Diamond, but televisions, copying machines and clunky computer monitors can add up quickly.
He says the response to the program has been “fantastic” and it is still going strong today.
Shift Recycling can afford to pay its customers because it partners with an OES-affiliated recycling company that passes on some of its funding.
“It’s just about being as creative as possible in terms of marketing, and getting the word out to the right people,” says Diamond.
But not all e-recycling companies are as optimistic.
Randy Coulter, an owner of Twenty Twelve Electronics Recycling in Ottawa, cautions that recycling electronics is a business with low profit margins, even before giving away money.
“Are you ever going to get rich doing this? Not a chance. It’s a break-even, small-margin business at best,” he says.
Martinek knows Recycle Frog’s expansion is not yet concrete, but he says the company has made “some significant steps in the right direction” in terms of building partnerships with other businesses and government.
As for Coulter's contention that the business is a break-even in nature, Martinek doesn’t seem intimidated.
“We’re not going to get into this to be a small player,” he says. “We got into this gold-buying business and we’re the largest in Ontario and the third-largest in Eastern Canada right now . . . so we expect to be a large company in the next couple of years in this space as well.”
That could be a good thing for Ottawans with overcrowded garages.