WinCycle in Windsor to close

By JOHN LIPPMAN

Valley News Business Writer

Published: 06-13-2019 10:03 PM

WINDSOR — WinCycle, the Windsor nonprofit that sells refurbished laptops for a fraction of the cost, has been sold to a New Hampshire e-waste collector and will close its Main Street store this summer.

But the service WinCycle provides is not entirely going away. Perhaps fittingly for a computer retailer, the business will shift to online.

North Coast Services, as part of its agreement to buy WinCycle’s assets, has agreed to hire Roger Ellison, the nonprofit’s general manager and computer engineer who refurbishes the laptops, to head up a similar effort on behalf of the e-waste collector. The company then plans to sell the refurbished computers — the overwhelming majority of which are professional-grade laptops — through eBay, Craigslist and other online avenues such as Amazon and Walmart.

“It had gotten to the point where it had become a one-man show and was no longer economically sustainable,” Ellison, WinCycle’s manager, said on Thursday of the nonprofit’s original chartered mission to keep computer equipment out of the landfill and refurbish it for low-cost resale to the public.

He called the takeover “a way of WinCycle ending well without doing a belly-flop.”

North Coast Services launched in Portsmouth, N.H., in 2011 and recently relocated its headquarters to Concord. The company has quickly grown as a regional player in the e-waste business by collecting computers, electronic equipment, lamps and appliances from municipalities, educational institutions and hospitals. The company has two locations each in Maine and New Hampshire, including Claremont, where its computer refurbishing business under Ellison will be based.

“We have access to all kinds of equipment from our (e-waste) collection service throughout Northern New England, but (refurbishing laptops) was a piece of the industry we were not really involved in, so it’s a nice fit,” Tom Fatcheric, one of the owners of North Coast Services, said on Thursday.

He said North Coast Services sees refurbishing and upgrading the computers it receives through its e-waste collection business as a new profitable niche for the company.

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Ellison said that under the agreement, all previous warranties will continue to be honored. Joining Ellison at North Coast Services will also be Dean Hare, WinCycle’s in-house expert on Apple computers.

Starting next week, WinCycle's hours will be reduced and inventory will be marked down.

WinCycle, which has sold thousands of refurbished professional-grade computers over the years to people, small businesses and nonprofits that could not afford the cost of a new one, had been in search of way to continue operating since it lost its contracts with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth College early in 2018.

The two institutions supplied WinCycle with the vast bulk of its laptops — principally high-grade Lenovo (formerly IBM) ThinkPad models — which had been used by staff but discarded as part of regular upgrade cycles.

Ellison said that, at its peak, WinCycle was receiving about 1,000 laptops and PC’s from the two institutions annually. In the early 1990s WinCycle moved to Windsor and for a time took on recycling everything from office furniture to grounds crew uniforms.

“It was like an ongoing garage sale there for awhile,” said Mark Glassberg, president of WinCycle and who has been involved with the organization since its earliest days.

But early in 2018, the college and medical center, concerned about “downstream documentation” as to where e-waste materials were going after it passed through WinCycle, ended their ties to the nonprofit and consolidated their contracts to a commercial recycler.

Since then, WinCycle continued to remain open by selling down the inventory of laptops it had in stock. But, as people switched to cellphones and tablets, WinCycle’s annual sales fell from $257,000 in 2014 to about $125,000 last year, Ellison said.

Glassberg credited Ellison, a self-taught computer savant who relocated to the Upper Valley from California in 2001, with uplifting an organization that was run akin to a hobby and transforming it into a full-time service that breathed new life into computers that were superior to the consumer models sold at box stores. Ellison would delete the operating system on the laptops and install a LINUX operating system.

“We would do one or two at a time. Then Roger said, ‘Let’s automate it’ and found a way to network dozens of computers in order to install a new operating system — which can take up to seven hours — at the same time.

“At one point he was able to do 70 machines at a time,” Glassberg marveled.

John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.

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