MaSeR Adds Capacity

An influx of computers, printers, copying machines and other obsolete items has prompted MaSer Corp., Barrie, Ontario, Canada, to expand its recycling facility.

The company’s Lauren Roman says MaSeR reached its processing capacity in the fall of 2007 and began holding back new suppliers. She attributes the deluge of electronic scrap from North American recyclers to “customers [who] are increasingly demanding total domestic (Canada and U.S.) recovery.”

“Between January and August of this year, we went from receiving about 400 tons to 800 tons per month,” says Keith Blinn, the company’s vice president of operations. “We needed to hit the brakes a bit at that point to ramp up our system throughput to ensure we can continue to service the market,” he adds.

As volume increased in late 2007, MaSeR secured a 70,000-square-foot facility adjacent to its original plant to house administrative offices, incoming material and quality control operations. Also, since August MaSeR has added shifts and is installing new processing equipment to further address its in-bound volume.

According to a MaSeR news release, “Market dynamics are creating a perfect storm for recyclers [who] can demonstrate complete domestic recovery. Eight U.S. states and five Canadian provinces have passed electronics recycling legislation and, in the U.S., bills have been filed in 23 [other] states.” Many of the laws required recyclers to have auditable downstream markets to prevent unchecked export of hazardous material to other countries.

“We work closely with our suppliers to make it simple for them to meet increasingly prudent recycling requirements” says Lauren Roman, executive vice president of MaSeR. “We’re on track to process more than 3,000 tons in the first quarter of 2008,” she notes.

A portion of the company’s new investment will allow it to segregate plastic earlier in MaSeR’s process, ideally creating more marketable plastic scrap.

MaSeR pays other electronics recyclers for many types of electronic scrap and provides them with a recovery solution that customers can readily audit, according to the company.

Additional information on MaSeR can be found at www.masercorp.com.