GreenCitizen does more than recycle your e-waste

I first learned about GreenCitizen several years ago when I was trying to figure out what to do with old CDs and DVDs. Since then, Michael and I have taken several dead gadgets to them: our old rice cooker, our old blender, and some obsolete computer equipment. So I was excited to take a tour of GreenCitizen’s hub in Burlingame this weekend and have a chat with founder and CEO James Kao.
Kao was born in Taiwan and graduated from UCLA in 1982 with a degree in math and computer science. He went on to get an MBA and work for companies like HP, IBM, and Oracle as a software engineer. As a guy with an engineering mindset, he’s all about solving problems. So, after seeing a short film called “Exporting Harm: The High Tech Trashing of Asia” about e-waste pollution overseas, he set out to create a solution.
GreenCitizen is more than a recycling center for e-waste. Kao wants to rethink the idea of waste in the first place. As… Read the rest