Living Green

Phone recycler saves buyers money, landfill space

LANTANA, Fla. — Old telephones get a second life at Sean Maki's warehouse.

The 36-year-old owner and operator of Sean Maki Communications LLC buys phones that other companies are getting ready to toss, cleans them up and resells them. The phones get reused instead of heading to the dump.

"With recycling, people think you have to go all out," said Maki, who lives in Lake Worth, Fla. "But if everyone did just a little bit, it would make a difference."

Maki's little bit has added up to putting 8 tons of refurbished telephones onto the market this year. He wants to double that amount in 2008.

He gets about half of the phones from installers and the other half from other businesses. Some clients include mortgage companies that have folded, asset-disposal firms and nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity.

"Very much like computers, this business has been a throwaway business," said Bill Hazi, owner of Omni Telecommunications Inc., a Riviera Beach, Fla., company that has sold phones to Maki. "There has always been a market for reused and refurbished equipment, and I suspect a lot of it has gone into the landfills. Sean gives us great value and keeps things out of landfills."

On Monday, Maki drove around Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in a truck. He picked up 250 pounds of used telephones from one client and checked out the phones that other businesses were pitching.

At his warehouse - Maki occupies one bay in a row of several - the phones are taken apart; cleaned; given new cords, handsets or whatever they need; and then packaged to be sold again, most likely through his store on eBay.

He may post, for example, a picture of a refurbished phone and says he's selling 100 of them at $20 apiece plus a one-year warranty.

"It saves people money who don't need to buy an expensive system," he said.

For Maki's part, he's paid as much as $75 for phones and as little as $3. But he gets for free ones that he knows may sit on the shelf for a couple of years because of low demand.

About 10 percent of the phones are in bad enough shape that they can't be reused. Those phones are stripped, and the little parts - cords, plastic button covers, hook switches, feet - get tossed into trays labeled for them or ones marked "Misc." or "???"

The feet are critical, Maki says. They keep the phone from moving around someone's desk.

"You can't sell the phone if pieces are missing," he said. "If the little feet are gone, somebody is going to get upset."

The warehouse is a what's-what in phones: tubs of cords, rows of handsets, shelves stacked with tools and other equipment. The computer-and-wire "brains" of a phone sit in another area next to large rubber containers that hold more inventory.

"I feel like I'm getting better at it, but at the same time the economy is going down," said Maki, who has one part-time employee and sometimes contracts with others if a large number of phones need to be refurbished.

Maki contends that he wouldn't have a business if the Internet didn't exist.

"This business is not feasible if you don't have a large market to draw on," he said.

In fact, only 1 percent of his repackaged phones are resold in Palm Beach County, Fla. The rest go away - sometimes far away. Maki has shipped phones to New Zealand and Hong Kong. Closer to home, he has clients in Jacksonville, Fla., and Oregon. The phones are readied for shipment in dozens of small, brown boxes that fill several shelves in the middle of the warehouse.

Last week, some of those boxes went to Eddie Villarini, owner of ViaData One in Chicago. Villarini installs phone equipment and stumbled across Maki's operation on eBay.

"I ended up calling him that night" Villarini said. "It was about 8 p.m. my time, and I didn't think anyone was going to answer, but he did answer. I've been able to save my customers money and have been able to save plenty of money myself."

Maki moved to Lake Worth about 12 years ago and has been in the telecommunications business for 11 of those years, working most recently as an installer for BestCom, a telecommunications company based in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Figuring it would be the only way to raise enough money to buy a house, Maki started his business two years ago. He has noticed other small companies popping up on the Internet as well. He keeps an eye on the eBay customer comments to see how he's doing.

"There are enough comments to show I'm a credible source," he said.