Thanks in part to Jewish Family and Children’s Services, Yevgeniya Girshman, a Jewish mechanical engineer from Belarus, immigrated to San Francisco six years ago after trying to leave the former Soviet Union since 1980.
And thanks to Cartridge King, an innovative recycling franchise purchased by the S.F.-based JFCS’ Utility Workshop last August, Girshman is gainfully employed as a production supervisor. Her job at Utility Workshop, a self-supporting arm of JFCS, entails overseeing a staff of four workers, including other Jewish refugees, who take spent or damaged printer cartridges and restore them for reuse.
“I was a mechanical engineer in Belarus, that was a more difficult job,” Girshman says. “Here, this is much simpler, but I’m happy to be here.
“I left the Soviet Union for many complicated reasons, one of them being the treatment of Jews,” she adds.
Cartridge King was started in Maryland in 1990 by Chip Beziat, a job developer looking for ways to create non-mainstream jobs for immigrants and people with disabilities. Beziat saw that laser printer cartridge recycling was an up-and-coming environment-friendly business that could be sold as franchises to nonprofit organizations around the country.
It’s estimated that if all the printer cartridges in the United States were recycled, 24,000 tons of solid waste would be eliminated, says Ellen Newman of JFCS. Plus, recycled cartridges cost 30 to 60 percent less than new ones.
Cartridge King is now in more than 70 cities nationwide, and sales have doubled every month it has been at Utility Workshop. The owner of the San Francisco franchise, the 50-year-old Utility Workshop, employs emigres and others in need of job rehabilitation, who perform hand-assembly work for a wide range of Bay Area businesses. (Of Utility Workshop’s 50 employees, 12 are Bosnian refugees.)
Since Utility Workshop began the Cartridge King operation in September, the franchise’s sales have doubled every month; eight people have gone through the six-week cartridge recycling training program.
People make their way to Cartridge King through referrals, either through JFCS or through Jewish Vocational Services, according to Toba Olson, Cartridge King’s associate director.
“A lot of people who come from the former Soviet Union are very technically skilled, but it’s hard to find work out there,” she says.”
Cartridge King occupies a second-floor loft in Utility Workshop’s building at 18th Street and Potrero, where a long line of windows provides a sunny view of Potrero Street. Approximately 250 cardboard boxes of recycled toner cartridges fill several tall metal shelves.
On a recent weekday morning, women were working at wooden tables, disassembling and cleaning printer cartridges, then putting them back together.
Girshman watched as Liliana Hodzic, a Bosnian refugee who has been at Cartridge King since it began in September, carefully took apart a shiny black printer cartridge.
About 15 to 30 cartridges come in every day, says Wayne Mateski, the account sales executive for Cartridge King who also does the purchasing and oversees the production area.
The cartridges are then disassembled, all the toner is vacuumed out, and the parts are inspected. If any are defective, they’re replaced with parts purchased through Cartridge King’s suppliers.
Reassembled cartridges are reloaded with graphics-quality toner, tested again, then boxed and stacked for delivery to Cartridge King’s customers, including: AT&T, Wells Fargo Bank, Dean Witter, the Pacific Stock Exchange, Goldman Insurance, the UCSF Medical Center and San Francisco State University.