20 Years Old · From Dallas, TX
I'm a junior at CU Boulder studying economics and political science. During my first semester of sophomore year, I took an Environmental Sustainability and Features course, where I learned about the serious effects of e-waste on our environment when electronics are disposed of improperly.
After researching what options existed in Boulder, I found a real gap. People are left choosing between hauling all their e-waste to a drop-off facility themselves and paying processing fees, or searching to find the best-priced general recycler or junk management service that doesn't even specialize in e-waste management to come pick it up. E-waste is our sole focus, because it's the fastest-growing solid waste stream on earth. I started Juett Tech Rescue to fill that gap: a simple, transparently priced pickup with certified e-waste recycling, and electronics with refurbishment potential refurbished, resold, or donated instead of shredded, built for Boulder residents. I established the business in December 2025, spent the winter building the website and refining the idea, and launched pickup operations in March 2026. We are proud to be the only waste management service in Boulder focusing specifically on electronic waste management.
Big-box drop-off programs like Best Buy's do take electronics. The burden just stays with you: you load everything up and drive it there during store hours, and they cap how many items they take per household per visit, so a full closet or garage clean-out may require multiple trips. Once you hand it over, that is the end of it. Whatever you drop off gets dismantled for its commodity metals, plastics, and glass. It is not revalued into community needs through donation or resale, and nothing comes back to you.
We come to you, take the whole load in one go, and evaluate every item rather than sorting it into a bin. Cables, chargers, a laptop, the tech at the bottom of a drawer that looks like it is worth nothing to anyone: all of it routes through DRM Worldwide, a leader in expertise in the e-waste industry, where every item is assessed for a second life before anything is broken down. That order matters more than it sounds: only about 1% of the rare earth elements in electronics are ever recovered through recycling, so refurbishing and keeping electronics or their parts in use is the single most effective way to keep those materials in circulation. Anything that still works can be refurbished and rehomed in the community, which is not something a drop-off program can do for you. We allocate every pickup for the most profitable outcome for you when resale is possible, and for the most social impact when it is not: minerals back into use, working devices back into local hands, and the data behind why this matters shared openly with the people we serve. That is what makes the whole process convenient, affordable, and therefore accessible.
Everything we do is transparently and fairly priced, and it's built to handle the whole process in one go. If it runs on a battery or plugs in, we pick it up, securely wipe any data that needs wiping, and take everything to our certified, gold-standard partner facility.
Juett Tech Rescue's goal is to save all electronic waste. Less than 23% of e-waste is formally recycled globally, it is the fastest-growing municipal waste stream in the world, and it accounts for roughly 70% of the toxicity in landfills when it ends up there. So we take all of it, and our motto says it plainly: if it plugs in or runs on a battery, we'll take it. This is about the full cycle of recycling, and it starts with keeping electronics out of the landfill. We still handle refurbishment; it's one part of the mission, not the whole point. What we want is to contribute to the circular economy, putting rare earth minerals back into use, whether that is through our certified recycling facility or through refurbishment that gives a device a second life by donation or resale. Not waste, but a resource worth recovering.
Electronics with refurbishment potential are restored and then donated or resold, your choice. Choosing resale puts a little money back in your pocket and takes the hassle of repairing and reselling off your hands. We do this through a specialized network: resourcing to our main partner, DRM Worldwide, along with a former CU professor who helps us donate old laptops.
The facts are striking: the world generates over 50 million metric tons of electronic waste every year, making it the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet. According to the Global E-Waste Monitor 2024, only 22.3% of e-waste is formally recycled globally. When electronics end up in landfills, toxic materials such as lead, mercury, and cadmium leach into the soil and groundwater, posing serious risks to both human health and local ecosystems. The World Health Organization has identified improper e-waste disposal as a growing public health concern.
The goal of this business is to make electronic waste recycling accessible for Boulder County residents and small businesses by tackling the issue head-on and closing the gap in convenience and affordability. I am also committed to giving back: a percentage of profits from every pickup is donated to Basel Action Network (BAN), a nonprofit dedicated to fighting illegal e-waste dumping and advocating for responsible recycling worldwide.
