When Joe Waters founded Vexor Technology Inc. in 1999 he had innovation on his mind.
Today, just six years later, the company, built around outsourcing the management of nonhazardous industrial waste, employs nearly 40 people in its Medina facility and anticipates year-end revenue to hit the $7 million.
Vexor not only manages waste, it also designs more efficient processing equipment and is active in recycling, including the production of alternate fuels from the nonhazardous waste it manages for clients, which it then sells back to the customers for use as replacement fuels.
The company recently expanded its processing capacity by 80 percent and is in the process of buying another processing and recycling facility in the Southeastern United States that Waters says will help double the company’s sales within the next three years.
Smart Business spoke with Waters about what it takes to remain innovative and how he plans to take Vexor to the next level.
How do you grow your company while remaining environmentally responsible?
We only handle nonhazardous waste, [and] many of the waste streams are recycled. We clean the waste oil and sell it as fuel; we strip away the metal from waste streams. For example, a lot of material comes in steel drums. We take the material out of the steel drums, clean the steel drums and sell them as scrap metal. Plastics are segregated and recycled.
Some containers can’t be [recycled] or some waste streams can’t go into the waste energy streams — facilities that burn industrial waste to make steam and electricity. A lot of those [are sent] for waste water treatment or [are deposited] into nonhazardous waste landfills.
We have two themes: Resource recovery for energy and landfill avoidance. A lot of manufacturers that generate waste do not want to go to a landfill because it’s not considered green or best management practices. Best management practices would lead you to do whatever you can to reduce your waste streams or avoid disposal; in other words, try to create some kind of resource out of the waste.
It’s not always economically possible. Sometimes, it costs the generators more to avoid the landfill. But some choose to pay more because it’s better for the environment.
How do you help manufacturers make those types of decisions?
We try to present a least-risk/least-cost option. Least-risk is avoiding the landfill. Going into a landfill is considered risky because you’re putting material in the ground. It’s risky for the environment and it’s risky for the generators, but sometimes it’s the least-cost method.
Recycling is sometimes more expensive but it’s the better thing to do. So it depends what the customer’s charter is, what his philosophy is and what his responsibility to the environment is.
How challenging is it to remain current with changes in EPA rules and regulations?
We have a technical manager and an environmental health and safety manager; these are management-level personnel. [Because] we only process nonhazardous waste, we have to make sure that the people we send the waste to — a recycling facility or a landfill — are also in compliance. We’re not just policing ourselves, we’re also policing our vendors.
We have our own transportation, so we need to comply with Department of Transportation (DOT) regulations – inspecting trucks and driver training. Employee training is a big thing — safety training for transporting waste materials, liquids and solids, in small containers and in bulk shipments. It’s quite costly.
How does innovation factor into your company’s growth?
It affects the way we approach our customers with options to handle their materials. We develop and build most of our own equipment.
If we’re going to do a new process, we build a small version of it. Then we develop that and build into a full scale model.
How was research and development part of your company’s original plan?
We didn’t have all the answers but we knew we would bring mechanical, chemical and technical people on who could help us develop processes. We make constant improvements on equipment that handles the waste materials safely and efficiently.
We try to reduce employee contact with waste streams by using pieces of equipment to process the material. We don’t hold any patents but we have proprietary pieces of equipment. If you patent something, then everybody knows about it.
They can’t copy it but they can kind of modify it. We don’t want to make our competitors stronger.
HOW TO REACH: Vexor Technology Inc., (330) 721-9773 or www.vexortechnology.com
