The Canadian arm of ITAD operator EPC is expanding with a facility in the Edmonton area.
CSI EPC, the company’s Canadian operation, is gearing up to open a 6,000-square-foot processing plant in Edmonton, which is the capital of Alberta and Canada’s fifth-largest city (with just under 1 million residents).
The facility will be able to process roughly 35,000 assets per year, company president Colin Taves told E-Scrap News. The Edmonton facility is slated to be operational within the next two weeks.
The growth comes about a year after the company opened a location near Vancouver, British Columbia, and Taves said the company is identifying future opportunities for growth in Canada as well.
“Our approach here in Canada is smaller facilities but more of them,” he said. That’s because the population centers are more spread out in Canada compared with the U.S., he explained.
CSI EPC is a subsidiary of CSI Leasing Canada, which is part of global company CSI Leasing. The CSI Leasing global group of companies also includes other recycling and electronics processing facilities throughout the world, including a number of EPC facilities in the U.S.
Potential in health care and energy sectors
The latest expansion is driven by EPC’s customer requirements, Taves said. EPC has serviced the Edmonton region for several years, trucking material from customers in and around Edmonton down to the company’s existing facility in Calgary.
The company decided to expand to improve service for existing customers, and to meet new demand that’s come up over the past year. The region has sizable health care, energy and corporate sectors driving ITAD growth, Taves noted, as well as government entities needing to refresh assets.
Like its U.S. counterpart, CSI EPC focuses primarily on the commercial sector for bringing in assets, handling only a small amount of residential material. The company has reuse and asset recovery at the core of its business model, and the Canadian division sends devices that are unsuitable for reuse to a downstream outlet for recycling.
Of late, EPC has brought more services into its ITAD operations beyond parts harvesting and asset recovery. These include providing companies with relocation and secure transport services, on-site hard drive shredding capabilities, and more.
“Our focus has been on remarketing reusable assets, those types of areas, as well as some other niche service areas that we’ve been able to expand to meet client requirements over the years,” Taves said.
Adapting to fill evolving customer needs has been an essential part of EPC’s growth in the ITAD space, Taves explained.
“If we have a large customer requirement, we have the ability to redesign our process to meet those ever-changing needs,” he said. Given the fast-changing world of technology, “you have to be prepared to act quickly to respond to those needs,” he said.
Rather than identifying a rigid set of services that customers can seek out, EPC focuses on working with clients and customizing its services when possible, Taves said.
