Think of Alex Sumetsky and Mikhail Zabezhinsky as modern-day scrap dealers, descended from the immigrants who once dominated the old iron-and-steel yards of Washington Avenue N. in Minneapolis
Their latter-day scrap company is called OceanTech.
And these two, Russian Jewish immigrants and boyhood friends, are the sons of medical and business professionals. They stumbled into the fledgling, fragmented electronics-recycling market through part-time jobs while at the University of Minnesota nearly a decade ago.
Today they are growing entrepreneurs in the booming business of electronics recovery and reuse that is driven by strong demand for used technology components; tougher government regulations that ban TVs, computers and other hazardous stuff from landfills and incinerators, and the growing consumer and corporate "green" movement.
"I finished at the university in 2005 in economics and finance and was interviewing at places like Target and U.S. Bancorp," said Sumetsky, 31. "I was working part time for a recycling company that no longer exists. And we starting a 'remarketing department' that used eBay to sell parts online. Before that, I was just using the phone."
Their next-generation ambitions span a growing, multi-state customer list of Fortune 500 companies and smaller clients. OceanTech's clearinghouses range from the 1950s-vintage warehouse they own in northeast Minneapolis -- stuffed with laptops, disk drives, printers and cameras -- to the vast Internet marketplaces where every day they find buyers for their goods. Most days, OceanTech has about 2,000 electronic items for sale on eBay.
Sumetsky and Zabezhinsky say they are growing in a consolidating market because they have invested in marketing, certifications, secure-data destruction and asset-management expertise to build a higher-value business around "recovering value" for clients. They find buyers for old technology, refurbish some things, and share a percentage of sales, rather than just charging customers for pickup and grinding plastics and metal to shreds and selling it as industrial feedstock.
Maggie Mattacola, interim director of the Recycling Association of Minnesota, has watched the evolution of OceanTech.