WSC finds its nontraditional niche

For more than a decade, Whits Services Corp. (WSC) has relished the opportunity to take on recycling challenges and find tailored solutions for materials that may otherwise end up in a landfill.

Headquartered in St. Louis, the company specializes in recovering nonconventional material streams while working with more than 4,000 processing partners across North America and the Caribbean to collect and recycle those items. Since its 2013 founding, CEO Mark Whitley says the company has grown organically, with national waste and recycling companies contacting it for assistance in developing sustainable recycling and waste management programs as new and nontraditional waste and recycling requirements have emerged in their operations.

“Our strength lies in tackling challenging tasks, and we have a preference for operating within the nontraditional niche,” Whitley says. “In most cases, other providers do not have a solution before WSC steps in.”

Whitley says WSC establishes “close and profound” client connections, primarily focusing on servicing North America’s largest waste and recycling companies and, specifically, their national accounts and customer locations. The company counts some of the largest automotive, retail and fulfillment companies in North America as its clients.

Diverting difficult streams

Whitley says WSC organizes and carries out more than 50,000 date- and location-specific work orders each year, with that total increasing by 20 percent to 25 percent annually. Through WSC programs, the company claims thousands of tons of recyclable materials are diverted from landfills each year.

The company employs a team of 20 people, with eight focused on national recycling and waste initiatives and 12 responsible for managing the collection and processing of materials locally. With the help of its network of processing partners, collected material is sent to scrap yards, wood mulching facilities, electronic scrap processors, paper mills and plastic processing facilities.

WSC specializes in developing recycling solutions for white goods, e-scrap, wood pallets and crates, low-volume ferrous and nonferrous metals and expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam, among other items, and also offers bulk debris removal and waste-to-energy solutions.

Along with more labor-intensive tasks, WSC also provides comprehensive sustainability tracking for its customers with the use of its proprietary software. The company says its work order system allows for customer flexibility and can customize data collection and generate reports based on parameters that include location, regions, districts, programs, service dates and more.

To physically collect and process material, the company deploys semitrailers and straight trucks and has advanced refrigerant recovery equipment for appliances. WSC also uses equipment such as balers, EPS foam densifiers, wire granulators and manual separation processes. Processing is conducted both in-house and at numerous locations throughout the U.S.

“Our programs result in diverting over 300,000 used appliances per year from conventional disposal methods,” Whitley says. “With the clients’ approval, some of these appliances are exported and restored in Central America, offering affordable washers and refrigerators to numerous consumers in the region. An additional program diverts more than 75,000 wooden pallets and crates each year from traditional disposal sites.”

He adds that WSC’s robust network has the capacity to refurbish and repurpose wooden crates for logistics companies. Additionally, he says that if the crates and pallets are deemed irreparable, they are ground into mulch for use in commercial landscaping operations across the U.S.

Whitley says the company consistently seeks out new waste and recycling prospects both domestically and internationally, and in the coming years will continue to focus on EPS while also expanding into the processing of end-of-life solar panels. He is hopeful that a unique solar panel recycling process WSC has developed will be granted a processing patent this year.

“With the increasing prominence of solar panels in the U.S., WSC is eager to provide our services across North America,” Whitley says.

Making recycling work

WSC points to numerous recycling programs it has developed throughout its history as examples of success in processing hard-to-recycle material.

One example is Whitley’s collaboration with a national waste and recycling company on a program to recycle appliances that spans more than 1,880 locations across the U.S. and Canada and has been managed by WSC for the last several years.

Another example was a program developed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Whitley, a national retailer with more than 1,100 North American locations—each spanning more than 15,000 square feet—decided to widen its store aisles from 36 inches to 48 inches. That process resulted in a surplus of metal and wooden retail fixtures that needed to be recycled. WSC stepped in and successfully managed the recycling of all 1,100 locations within 37 days, diverting the wood to compost and mulching facilities and sending the metal to scrap recyclers across the U.S.

“Typically, when WSC is approached to develop a program for a national account, there is often no existing program in place,” Whitley says.

Through its expertise in recycling unconventional materials and its relationships with its processing partners, WSC is striving to find unique solutions.