pointed to by Rick Gosselin.
Company: SIMCO
Owners: Rick Gosselin and Cathy Klimasewski
Location: 30 Martin St., Cumberland
Employees: 2 full-time, 8 part-time
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Year founded: 1991
Type of business: Scrap management
Annual revenue: WND
The warehouse at SIMCO in Cumberland is a high-tech junkyard.
Hundreds of outdated and/or broken computers are piled high around the perimeter as workers sift through the guts of hard drives that may one day be another person’s jewel.
The higher the piles of computers are in the warehouse, the happier company President Rick Gosselin is.
Since 1991 the company has been in the business of what Gosselin calls "demanufacturing," which involves assisting a var-iety of manufacturing industries in maximizing the value of their scrap inv-entories.
And for the past year SIMCO, which stands for Scrap Inventory Management Company, has been involved with recycling computers. Whether it’s recycling entire units, or taking them apart for parts, the company hopes to turn the computer portion of the business into a bigger deal.
Before deciding to establish a full-service electronics recycling operation the company met with state representatives, the Department of Environmental Management, and environmental consultants. Gosselin said he also visited lead and glass recyclers, equipment refurbishers, computer manufacturers and scrap metal processors.
"We learned that cathode ray tubes can retain enough voltage in their capacitor to be lethal if dismantled improperly, so we grounded our workstations to protect employees," he said.
The company has ten employees, and according to Gosselin each "demanufactures" about eight computers per hour. He said he visited some Mass-achusetts-based companies specializing in recycling computers and taking them apart, and that their employees take apart about 10 computers per hour. He figures eight isn’t that bad, because his company is the only Rhode Island company to specialize in such a field.
Sometimes the company purchases the equipment that is about to be thrown away, if they see a re-sale value, but most of the time companies pay SIMCO to take away what they can no longer use. With major clients including A.T. Cross, Foxborough Computer, and American Power Conversion, Gosselin said that the work can be inconsistent.
"It’s feast or famine," he said. "We could have trailer-loads one day, and nothing the next."
It is for this reason that Gosselin has not abandoned the other component of his business, which includes taking apart items other than computers. And the connections he has from the other sectors of SIMCO have been helpful as well. As international metal brokers the company has an outlet for almost every metal.
One of the duties of a SIMCO employee includes separating precious metals on the control panels found inside computers.
"Nothing we have is thrown away. Everything is recycled," said Gosselin.
SIMCO has also been involved in new recycling ventures such as processing compact discs to separate metal from plastic.
Of the stacks of technological rubble SIMCO Vice President Cathy Klimasewski said when her husband Ken, who is in the computer industry, comes to the warehouse he feels like he’s in a museum.
"He just loves to look at all the old stuff," she said. "Because he can’t believe how quickly things change and how some machines are now so obsolete."
Gosselin said the rapid pace at which technology changes is beneficial to his business.
"It is estimated that in the U.S. 315 million computers will become obsolete by the year 2004," he said. "When you consider that the average computer monitor weighs approximately 40 pounds that equates to over 12.6 billion pounds of scrap."
In the rare instances that SIMCO doesn’t take apart the computers from its clients, the company targets secondary sales markets such as China, Japan, India, Pakistan, South Africa and Korea for equipment with resale value.
