In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

Entrepreneuring To A 3-Way Pay-Off

In Business, July-August, 2005, Vol. 27, No. 4, p. 29

Louisville company works with zoos and other nonprofits to raise money to benefit animals, protect resources and put old phones to good use.

Eric Ronay

BY THE END of 2005, it's estimated that 130 million cell phones will be discarded annually in the United States - with 75 percent ending up in landfills where their toxins like lead and arsenic can leach into groundwater. Our Louisville, Kentucky-based company - Eco-Cell - is partnering with zoos across North America to raise funds for animal conservation programs while protecting the environment. The idea is for people to take old cell phones to collection boxes at the zoo which then sends them to Eco-Cell for refurbishing and sale to low income, first-time users in Latin American countries and elsewhere. Phones that cannot be resold are recycled. Nearly 90 percent of our budgeted expenses go toward paying our partners for phone collection and support costs associated with our “nothing to buy, nothing to sell” program. The bottom line is that we are going to provide our partners in conservation with the most effective cell phone recycling possible and generate a profit doing it.
Eco-Cell was founded in 2002 after my father, William Ronay, longtime entrepreneur, saw a booth at a trade show for a recycler offering to pay consumers $1 to recycle used cell phones. But consumers had to mail their phones to the recyclers, often costing them more than the $1 being offered. One of the first potential clients he approached was the Louisville Zoo, which quickly adopted the idea.
In 2005, I joined my father's firm as vice president and began to build upon the success at the Louisville Zoo by registering more zoos across the U.S. and Canada. North American Zoos seemed to be in the best possible position to collect large quantities of cell phones given their incredible volume of visitors - drawing 134 million visitors each year, more than the NFL, NBA and major league baseball combined!
We learned to speak the language of zoos around here, learned their organizational structures to find the departments most suited to implementing the program, published a zoo newsletter documenting tips and tricks of collecting cell phones at zoos, and in the process learned much more about conservation and the mission of the modern zoo. In return for their partnership, we promised to keep prices we paid for their phones as competitive as possible by increasing our cell phone volume and being smart on the business end by using a bidding system to sell our inventory. This is an especially salient business point.
We have found that most phones donated via the zoos are medium to low end value phones. Rather than “fish around” for the occasional high dollar phone (the kind that almost never ends up in zoo collection bins), pay top dollar for it and nothing for the rest, we take our inventory of medium to low end phones to the marketplace in quantity, and sell them to the highest bidder. As volume increases, we are able to pay our fundraisers more for less valuable phones than solitary phone buyers.

FROM 3 TO 36 IN 2005
We quickly discovered that the recycling program was a perfect fit for the modern zoo - expanding from three zoos to 36 in 6 months. They include zoos in Akron, Birmingham, Boise, Cleveland, Denver, El Paso, Little Rock, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and PPG Aquarium and Zoo Atlanta. Money raised via the program is mostly used to fund conservation and education. In some instances, like that of the Philadelphia Zoo, a specific species (the endangered Douc Langur) was branded with its program. This is a most effective way to collect phones - find an animal or exhibit that the zoo is famous for and invite the public to bring in old cell phones to directly contribute to its welfare.
Our immediate goal is to be the de facto cell phone recycling company for all zoos in North America. We will reevaluate the success of this strategy after Earth Day 2006. Our company is also working with more than 300 nonprofit organizations with fundraising causes that range from fighting cancer to supporting children. We just partnered with the city of Laval in Quebec, Canada that annually collects household hazardous waste at City Hall. This year, they propose to recover cellular telephones as well.
Our goal is to provide an easy, low maintenance fund-raising program, protect natural resources, and satisfy a demand for technology in low income foreign markets.