Sage Sustainable Electronics is preparing to start up an ITAD processing center in Pennsylvania, increasing the reuse-centered company’s processing capacity by 25%.
Sage on Sept. 9 announced the new facility, which is located in Montgomeryville, about 25 miles north of Philadelphia. In an interview with E-Scrap News, company CEO Bob Houghton said the plant totals 45,000 square feet. He anticipates the facility will start up in October and noted it’s hiring for around 50 positions.
Houghton explained Sage’s processing volume has been growing fast, and the company began evaluating where it could add another location to best serve existing clients. Sage has a number of customers in the New York tri-state area as well as in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
“The Montgomeryville facility is really logistically convenient to both of those customer concentrations,” Houghton said.
Sage deals exclusively with large enterprise accounts, with 40% of its business concentrated in health care and 40% in financial services. It also has a number of defense contractor clients, which the new facility will be geographically well-positioned to serve.
Houghton estimated the new facility will process at least 250,000 assets per year, adding onto its existing capacity of about 1 million units per year at its other facilities. Sage currently has two processing sites in the Columbus, Ohio, area, and one in Reno, Nevada. It previously operated a facility in Baltimore but consolidated that site into the Columbus operation when the lease was up in 2020.
Sage has long prioritized reuse in its processing activities, and that will be the guiding mission at the new facility as well. Employees will triage equipment as it comes in and determine whether it is economically viable for refurbishment or whether it should be sent to a downstream partner for commodity recovery. Sage processes about 60% of its inbound assets for reuse and 40% for recycling.
Workers will perform a full range of diagnostics, testing, data wiping and repair services. Houghton noted Sage often repairs a greater array of devices than what might be considered standard in the ITAD industry because of the company’s reuse focus.
“We’re replacing a lot of hard drives, batteries, screens and keyboards, that type of thing,” Houghton said.
From there, the company provides redeployment — sending refurbished devices to customers to be put back into use — as well as resale, including through its status as a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher.
Sage does some other niche services, including providing legal holds. These are typically requested when a company, often in financial services, is going through an acquisition or a legal case and is required to retain the data on IT assets. In these cases, Sage identifies and catalogs the assets and then puts them into secure storage for courts or attorneys to access.
The expansion comes less than a year after Sage became a Closed Loop Partners portfolio company, and Houghton says the investment firm is an important partner in enabling the company to sustain its current growth curve.
“Sage is doubling in size every two to three years; in order to do it reliably and securely for the customer, it requires a lot of capital to make that work,” Houghton said.
But he added the value Closed Loop brings goes well beyond the financing. While a lot of private equity firms are chasing the ITAD business right now, not all of them have experience in the electronics recovery world. With Closed Loop, Houghton sees a set of shared values.
“They’ve completely supported our mission, and we’re completely aligned on where we want to take the business,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier with them as a partner.”
