(Describer) In an animation, two people carry a sofa, then drop it. Two legs on one side of it break. The people walk away. Title: Scientists and Engineers on Sofas and Other Furnishings. A chain and hook from the first E in “Engineers” lifts the fallen side of the sofa.
♪
(woman)
When the founder of the
cell phone recycling company,
(Describer) Walking down a hall...
ecoATM,
came to town,
I couldn't pass up
the opportunity
to talk to him about the value
of science-based business.
The NSF's Small Business
Innovation Research program
gave start-up funding
to ecoATM in 2011,
because it turns out,
it takes many
high-tech tools
to turn old electronics...
(Describer) On a flip-phone...
Yeah, I'll be right down.
into a commercial
enterprise
that helps save
the environment.
I'm Sarah Bates.
I sat down with entrepreneur
and ecoATM founder
Mark Bowles to learn more about
the innovation
behind the kiosks
making a difference
in the world.
(Describer) Outside...
It's a problem when phones
aren't recycled.
There's arsenic, lead,
and other bad stuff inside.
Yeah.
There's two sides--
the easy side everyone knows
is electronics
end up in the landfill,
break down eventually,
some of them
have nasty stuff that
gets into the water table.
It takes hundreds of years,
but it's not good.
Keeping them from landfills
is one thing,
but a bigger side
is creating mobile phones.
When you throw it out--
you're tired of your iPhone
(Describer) They sit on concrete benches.
after 18 months,
and get a new one,
that phone still
has life in it.
Maybe two, three lives.
Some people want that.
If you give it to the next
guy and the next,
that stops the creation of
another phone from scratch.
Then, the end-of-life ones,
let's say it's done,
and then you reclaim
the metal from that,
you don't have to mine
that from the ground.
(Describer) Trucks drive through an open-pit mine.
You did get a Small Business
Innovation Research grant
from the National
Science Foundation?
I did.
Why is this a project
that involved innovation?
What is the fundamental
research
(Describer) At an ATM labelled “instant cash for phones”, a young man puts a sticker on a phone, which he places in a drawer that closes.
behind the device itself?
So it's an interesting
machine vision problem.
Our cameras look
at the phones.
Machine vision
usually looks for,
"it's not like this"--
looking at parts
going down a production line
and looking for the errors.
Many of these phones
are rectangular
black sheets of glass
without many different features.
They look similar.
Very similar.
Machine vision wasn't
applied to a problem with
4,000 to 6,000
different things
that look similar,
but you must identify
each separately in
a three-dimensional database,
and then you have
to not only identify them,
you must grade them:
how's it broken and how badly?
I had a little background in
facial recognitions technology,
and thought we could
apply it to this.
There's many
steps involved
in having the machine
scan the device,
Yeah.
and making sure that it works.
But you accept
all cell phones?
Yeah, we take them all,
if we can identify
them as phones.
It won't take a banana.
Some phones are worth
not very much.
Not very much.
The end of life.
This is a classic...
(Describer) She opens her flip phone.
That's a classic--
that's a good word, yeah.
flip phone.
Yeah, so would this be
worth at least a dollar?
It's worth a dollar.
We'll pay a dollar.
We can sell it for a dollar,
$1.25 to the smelter
that will reclaim it.
When it's processed and shipped,
we lose a few dollars,
but it's our brand promise
to retrieve them.
We'd rather you give them to us
instead of a landfill.
(Describer) Seagulls swarm over a landfill.
I can see the use of ecoATM
for environmental reasons.
The environment wins, right?
Mm-hmm.
The person with junk
in their drawer
that would've ended
in a landfill, they get money.
The retailer wins,
bringing the phones in,
turning it into cash
in our machine.
Most of that is spent
in the store.
The person downstream wins,
because they get a phone
they couldn't afford otherwise.
EcoATM wins, we make
some money in the process.
You talked about
this earlier,
why it's important
for an agency like NSF
to give you
that seal of approval?
The fact that we got
through the NSF's filter
(Describer) National Science Foundation.
and were selected
as a grantee was a real nice--
credibility begets
more credibility,
and many times
when you're trying
to raise money,
get customer attention,
or anybody having
some baseline credibility,
the NSF brand carries
tremendous weight.
You started
as a small company,
a startup.
We started as an idea
in a coffee shop.
Now, you're
how many strong?
Today, there's
over 270 employees direct,
maybe another
100 indirect,
and NSF helped
in that process,
and it's created many jobs
and much success.
It was just a few years
after your initial SBIR
that you were acquired by--
Is it an acquisition?
It was an acquisition.
Outerwall bought us in July
last year for
$350 million in cash.
Wow.
And so we're part
of the family now.
I'm going to visit an ecoATM
and get my dollar.
All right.
There you go.
Although, it's worth
(Describer) She shuts her phone.
at least a dollar
and one cent, I think.
Thank you for coming by.
You're welcome.
(Describer) The title Scientists and Engineers on Sofas and Other Furnishings is pushed aside by the round logo for the National Science Foundation.
Funding to purchase and make this educational program accessible was provided by the U.S. Department of Education. Contact the Department of Education by telephone at 1-800-USA-LEARN, or online at www.ed.gov.
♪
