Know Your E-Scrap Processor: Premier Surplus, Inc.

Around Dawsonville, Ga., the way to electronics recycling is literally at the end of Asset Recycling Way.

That’s where e-scrap processor Premier Surplus is located. When company owners first bought the 137,000-square-foot facility on 11 acres to serve as a home for Premier Surplus, they also bought the short street that serves as a driveway into the property. The county let them change the name of the road.

Located around an hour’s drive north of downtown Atlanta, the company was founded in 2008 by husband and wife Phillip and Stephanie Kennedy. The company provides ITAD, data destruction and recycling services for a variety of public and private organizations.

With more than 90 employees, Premier Surplus operates out of a processing facility equipped with advanced data sanitization, shredding and sorting technologies. The company has a 2,500-square-foot space where it uses software from Softhinks to wipe and test mobile devices and hard drives. It’s capable of sanitizing up to 800 hard drives at once.

Premier Surplus also has a fleet consisting of four tractors with 25 trailers deployed throughout the Southeast to support larger clients. And it has four box trucks to assist with small- to mid-sized accounts.

Stephanie Kennedy said that good used equipment is remarketed through the company’s asset management department, which processes an average of 17,750 devices per month. Scrap material is sorted to be either manually dismantled or shredded.

“It is our goal to be a one-stop shop for all customers with asset management needs, as well as true scrap processing,” she said.

Premier Surplus’ custom-designed SSI shredding and separation system was installed earlier this year. It has allowed the company to better recover valuable commodities from a range of devices.

The system consists of an SSI T100, which is a low-speed, high-torque, three-shaft rotary shear shredder; a number of Industrial Magnetics, Inc. (IMI) sorting magnets; a Javelin eddy current for separating nonferrous metals; and a Tomra optical sorter equipped with an induction sensor and infrared optics for sorting out plastics and different grades of circuit boards.

“We’ve already secured market shares and footprint holds within the Southeast industry,” Phillip Kennedy said. “The shred system is just going to secure us even stronger and allow us to offer a better service to our clients and new clients, as the company continues its growth.”

The company also uses an older sorting line consisting of an SSI 2400e shredder, cross-belt magnet from A&A Magnets and manual sorting stations.

Separately, the company uses an SSI 1600e shredder for product destruction, an Ameri-Shred 2000HD-SSD for hard drive shredding, and Baler and Compaction Equipment (BACE) balers.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of E-Scrap News. Subscribe today for access to all print content.