Business I on the cover

Staff photos by Angie Bean

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eneficia

Nathan Zack amid electronic waste in his Detroit warehouse.

Recycler of

waste products

helps save the

environment.

Bill Carroll
Special to the Jewish News

N

athan Zack owns 700,000 pounds of electronic waste stored
in an 80,000-square-foot warehouse on Detroit's west side.
That resource is just part of the Jewish entrepreneur/envi-
ronmentalist's Great Lakes Electronics Corp., a multi-million-dollar-
a-year recycling business with branches in Florida and Ontario. Zack
also owns a couple of scrap yards on the side.
And he's only 26 years old.
"I'm an environmentalist first, then a businessman second;'
declares Zack of Birmingham, who founded the business in his base-
ment after dropping out of North Farmington High School, and has
built it into one of the top five electronic waste disposal companies in
the United States.
"Waste is an enormous and growing environmental problem, and I
want to help rid the country of waste products," he said. "We recycled
more than 31 million pounds of electronics alone last year, and we
hope to go over 60 million pounds this year. That's how we measure

this business — in pounds of waste, not dollars and cents."
Zack, Great Lakes Electronics CEO and president, and Kerry
Grushoff, 52, of Farmington Hills, who is vice president of marketing
and a family friend, like to call it "de-manufacturing, de-labeling and
destruction." There are small pieces of electronics everywhere after
the larger items are squashed and practically pulverized by every type
of destruction machine imaginable. There's even a special unit that
sucks any valuable commodity out of a typical fluorescent light bulb
and destroys the rest.

The Startup

Zack always has been interested in "tearing down stuff," and his
mother, Karen, a Greenpeace activist, got him even more interested in
the environment and a commitment to "being green." She is one of 65
employees at Great Lakes Electronics' main office on Greenfield Road
at Fullerton.
But the death of his father when Zack was 15 led Nathan on the
circuitous route to making some money and helping the environment.
He dropped out of North Farmington to help support his mother and

Beneficial Scraps on page 20

July 12 = 2007

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