Last month, we celebrated the 30th birthday of Desco Electronic Recyclers. While it is sometimes a little hard to believe that it has been so long, we are extremely grateful to all the customers and business partners who have travelled this road with us and have watched us grow beyond even our own expectations.
For context, back when we started it took a while before we built the business to be processing one ton of waste electronics a month. But we are now regularly processing 5000 tons a year.
Obviously, we’ve also grown from a staffing point of view. Back in 1992, Desco had a staff complement of five people: Desireee and Costa Airaga along with three people to help in various areas of the business. Today we have 75 employees working at our head office in Johannesburg and our branches in Cape Town and Durban.
We’re also ISO-certified: not once or twice but three times. We are compliant with three distinct standards: ISO14001 (since 2009), ISO45001 and ISO9001. We are also one of the few fully licensed South African recyclers and electronic waste processing companies.
Desco has also expanded the operation to offer a much wider range of services to our clients, including but not limited to:
- Software and sensitive information destruction.
- Plastic recycling.
- Copper granulation from cables found in e-waste.
- PCB separation and granulation.
- ITAD, where we refurbish computers for reuse and resale.
- Catalytic converters.
We soon expect to add Lithium Ion batteries to the list of materials that we can safely recycle for our clients.
As you can see, it has been an eventful 30 years and we’d like to thank everybody who contributed to making Desco what it is today. There are far too many of you to name here but you know who you are and we do appreciate you. We especially appreciate those of you who made time to celebrate our 30thy birthday this past Wednesday evening.
Thank you again. And here’s to the next 30 years.