April is Earth Month, and what better way to celebrate Earth Month than to interview our newest member company, Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations? Dynamic is a leader in sustainability and ESG. ESG is environmental, social, and governance and a collection of criteria that assess the robustness of a company’s governance and ability to manage its environmental and social impacts effectively. Join us in welcoming them to our UWEBC community! In a digital and data-driven world, securely processing electronics through their lifecycle and rejuvenating “tired” technology or recycling its components requires careful logistics and considerations. Dynamic brings cutting-edge solutions that promote sustainability and return value back to customers.
We sat down with Curt Greeno, President and Cofounder, and Ashley Foreman, Director of Corporate Services, to discuss their company, the amazing things they’re doing, and how they look forward to getting to know the UWEBC community.
Q: Tell us about Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations.
A: We are focused on the responsible disposition of electronics. That means that we take in retired electronic equipment and consumer electronics. Our purpose is to protect the planet and our customers’ interests by giving electronics their next best life, and that work extends to municipalities in Wisconsin as well as government entities and corporations.
With corporations, when they dispose of their electronics, we really want to try and provide more usable life from them. So, when they come in, we’ll wipe and completely sanitize the data. For example, if we’re working with a health care system, that private patient information is not getting sent out into the world. Then we can refurbish and remarket that equipment so that it can be recirculated into the economic stream. If it doesn’t have a reusable life, then we’re going to responsibly recycle it so that it doesn’t end up in a landfill. In fact, we have a zero-landfill policy.
We are headquartered in Wisconsin, with two locations in Wisconsin and one in Nashville. We do have a global footprint as well, but being able to offer those solutions to corporations in the State of Wisconsin – our own backyard – gets more electronics out of our landfills and responsibly dispositioned.
Q: Can you tell us how you heard about UWEBC and what got you excited to join? What were some of the things about the UWEBC that you think would benefit you and your new colleagues going forward?
A: [UWEBC] was recommended to me by another one of our team members, Jennifer Ostrem. She was part of the consortium through Organic Valley, and she shared the value she saw from that – both in the learning opportunities and in the networking.
As a company whose very foundation rests on sustainability, we saw a lot of opportunities to share our knowledge of sustainability solutions with the larger UWEBC community.
Q: Why did you ultimately choose to move forward with UWEBC membership, and how do you see it fitting in with your company’s mission? What excites you about being a member?
A: It fits perfectly with our purpose and mission. We’re a Wisconsin corporation, and as part of the UWEBC community, we want to learn, share and grow along with our fellow members to create a better, earth-healthy future for all of us.
And that includes our own employees. At Dynamic, we put people first and empower our team members to better themselves, their families, and others. So the personal development aspect of [membership] is very important to us. We’re pretty excited to further progress the professional development of our team members with the learning forums that the consortium provides.
Q: What are some of the benefits you hope to gain from your UWEBC membership?
A: Ultimately, we’re a technology company. The management of these electronics, being able to responsibly sanitize the data so we can then refurbish and resell it – that requires us to know what’s next in technology. What sorts of things are on the radar so that we can partner more effectively with our customers.
Being able to network with these companies, especially locally, creates a lot of opportunities for in-person connections and building those relationships on a larger scale. We’re excited to learn about what other companies are doing and sharing what we, ourselves, are doing – especially when it comes to sustainability and ESG. It helps everyone do better.
So we’re excited about the networking, the education, and the awareness, helping Wisconsin as a state be more sustainable.
Q: What’s something you (or your company) are working on right now that our members would love to hear about?
We have a carbon calculator that we just launched which showcases potential scope three emissions avoidance. For our corporate customers, when they send us their electronics, we give them back reports that let them know the estimated carbon offsets they’re generating. We can tell them the potential carbon impact of the choices they make – whether the equipment sent to us is reused, recycled or would have ended up in a landfill. We can actually show the data: ‘You sent us 100,000 pounds of computers last month. We resold those and this was the potential carbon impact of that.’ If this would have been manufactured from scrap or if it had just been recycled, they all have different carbon footprints.
We’re also working on our second annual ESG report (see the 2022 report here) that we provide our corporate customers, along with the carbon calculator. Other UWEBC members would probably be interested in this work. The SEC is going to mandate scope one and scope two emissions reporting from publicly traded companies in the coming future, so we’re ahead of the curve in that regard.
Q: We know Dynamic is all about sustainability, so we’d love to hear about that – especially with Earth Day and sustainability being celebrated in April!
A: There’s a lot going on right now! We launched an ESG report last year, our inaugural ESG report, and we’re launching our next one in April. Our ESG reports talk very clearly about what we’re doing, what our commitments are from an ESG standpoint internally and externally, how we’re supporting various sustainability initiatives with our customers, and what kind of goals we have. It’s pretty comprehensive and gives a good overview on what our focus is. And with launching that, that’ll be a good kind of showcase for our customers and update on what’s happening.
Internally, we have a green team sustainability committee. They do a lot of work around making sure our own operations are green. We usually do an Earth Month in April in recognition of Earth Day, and we have a lot of different activities where we’ll have different trivia, games, that kind of thing. They’re all focused on helping us internally to focus on our scope of emissions reduction as a company, and then also being able to focus on your own personal footprint and how you can impact that. It’s a pretty big month for us.
Q: What are some trends in your industry that you’ve seen emerge in the past couple of years?
A: The overall focus on having green business operations, the visibility to it, and the reporting on it, is a bigger part of the conversation now.
So is security and thinking about the continuous protection of the data in the unique devices and trying to find ways that we can recirculate those devices instead of landfilling or recycling them.
With the trend of everything moving to the cloud and the Internet of Things, data is everywhere. We have to be cognizant of that. It’s on your fridge, it’s on your watch. It’s on all these different devices. That’s a big change – data moving to the cloud – so we have computing power moving away from endpoint devices and into the cloud, so really data centers and servers is an area that we’re putting focus and energy into.
The last thing that I had that’s kind of linked to all of this is just that miniaturization is a big thing for us. Everything’s getting smaller and lighter, maybe even less computing power. That has data ramifications, but it also has recycling ramifications. The electronics themselves don’t contain as much value. On the recycling side, we get paid per pound. We extract gold and other metals from electronics, so now they’re lighter, and they’re made with fewer precious metals. That’s something unique in our industry that we’re dealing with. It’s probably not as much of an impact on the other members as much, but that miniaturization has an impact on things.
Here at UWEBC we want to reiterate how excited we are to have Dynamic Lifecycle Innovations as part of our UWEBC community. When you see someone from Dynamic at an upcoming event, welcome them!