Ex-Marine on mission to clean up e-waste, one truck load at a time

As he looked at the jigsaw puzzle of beat-up computers, printers and VCRs on the palett, Mike Wyatt of Fairplay muttered to himself as he tried to figure out where he was going to put the ancient Gateway monitor so the whole mess would fit in his truck.

“Stacking this stuff is as much an art form as anything else,” Wyatt said as he wedged the monitor in place. “I want to choke the guy who invented computer speakers.”

Wyatt, co-owner of Buffalo Peaks Recycling, has already had a busy day of stacking, hauling, and wrapping paletts of electronic waste in multiple layers of shrink-wrap. After it's all done he'll take his six paletts of junk from the Summit County landfill to Denver, where it will be broken down or sent out to other recycling companies around the country.

“I'm basically a collection and transport agency for the big recyclers,” Wyatt said. “I call it Buffalo Peaks Recycling because if I called it something else, people would wonder what I did.”

Though Wyatt doesn't actually break down the TVs, computers and other electronic equipment himself, he still provides a valuable service to people in Park and Summit County looking to dispose of their electronics properly. Though he's only been in Colorado for 18 months, Wyatt said he hauled 165,000 pounds of waste in his first year, and that business has only been going up since.

“I'm constantly picking up new customers,” he said. “I'll do two to three times that at a minimum this year.”

Wyatt's customer base is spread all over central Colorado, though he's secretive with specifics because of the intense competition in the recycling industry. He said he's gone as far south as Antonito and as far north as Kremmling for pick-ups.

“I have contracts with 31 school districts, seven counties and a bunch of individual towns,” Wyatt said. “If you base it on the number of pounds (of waste) by the population I cover, I'm probably the fastest growing recycler in Colorado.”

A public service

In spite of his booming business, Wyatt said he still mostly does his job as a public service. He said he doesn't make enough money to support himself without his military pension (Wyatt is a veteran of the Marine Corps) and he couldn't make a lot more money even if he wanted to.

“I'll never get rich doing this,” Wyatt said. “If I charged what I should be charging, I'd price myself out of the market.”

A large part of why Wyatt isn't making as much money as he'd like is his high costs. Wyatt said the only waste product he really makes money on is computer towers; everything else is either too expensive or too complicated to charge a lot of money for. Additionally, Wyatt said he takes pride in making sure all of the waste he picks up is properly handled. He said he resents companies who say they look out for the environment but don't follow through. One example he cited was Executive Recycling, a company based in Englewood that was linked to illegal waste dumping in China in a 60 Minutes story last November. Wyatt said he knows where all of his waste goes and that it's not just dumped in a landfill somewhere away from prying eyes.

“Ninety-nine percent of what I take out will be recycled,” he said with conviction.

Of course, just because Wyatt is willing to do the job doesn't necessarily mean everyone is willing to take him up on it. Wyatt said it can be a challenge to convince potential customers that what he's doing is worthwhile.

“The hardest part is getting people to care about what happens to their waste when they're done with it,” he said. “You wouldn't believe some of the attitudes I get.”

Wyatt isn't letting the downers get to him though; in fact, he's looking to expand. Wyatt said he's looking into some of out-of-state contracts (again, he won't say where) to supplement his business in Colorado. If he gets the bids, Wyatt said he'll dispose of around 1 million pounds of waste a year.