After Years of Giving and Support SMARTCO Needs Help

SMARTCO volunteer, Jude, who is blind, assembles computers by touch
– The Bay Net photos by Anna Bedford

At the very end of a street in Lexington Park I found the 14,000 square foot warehouse I was looking for, and at 7.30 p.m. on a Wednesday evening it was buzzing with activity and energy. This is where SMARTCO volunteers arrive after work to spend four hours refurbishing and recycling computers and electronics or training the unemployed, the underemployed, and the senior citizens of St. Mary’s County. I met with Ed Forsman, one of the co-founders of the organization. Even in the large warehouse there was little space to spare, so he led me to the main storage area and sat down on top a computer, motioning me to a similarly unorthodox seat beside him. Around us the volunteers continued to work and the intermittent crash of machinery being moved or dissembled punctuated the conversation.

SMARTCO was founded in 1992, and this particular project began in 1995 with a donation of computers from the Base. At that time SMARTCO was able to use new executive orders to distribute the machines – which would have otherwise become waste – to schools and other non-profits. Since then SMARTCO has donated or given to clients approximately 10,000 computers – and that doesn’t include the peripherals such as keyboards, printers, faxes, and so forth.

And it keeps giving. There were more than forty of the two hundred plus volunteers working on this Wednesday, and cumulatively they give around 10,000 hours of labor a year. The volunteers range from high school graduates to PhDs, from sixteen year olds to those in their seventies, and each is inspired to give their time and energy because of a belief in the mission of SMARTCO and its importance to the Southern Maryland Community.

Brian sorts through circuit boards to be recycled

Surrounded by donated machinery packed high on shelves, one has to wonder where all the stuff goes. Most of the computers are given to public, private and parochial schools. The remainder goes to Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Four hundred machines were sent to India as part of the Lexington Park Rotary Club’s project there, 90 machines went to Mississippi after the hurricane, and five machines recently went to a church in Ridge. “Name a building and it probably has a SMARTCO computer in it somewhere,” Forsman said.

SMARTCO is also the major electronics recycler in St. Mary’s, besides the government. In the last few years Forsman estimates they’ve recycled 100,000 tons of computer parts that would otherwise have ended up in a landfill. The computers that arrive in unusable condition or with pieces missing are stripped of useful components and sent to be melted down. Beside us, a volunteer named Brian was sorting circuit boards into a huge box to be sent to have precious metal taken out and melted down for future use. “Some day you might have some of this in your kitchen as aluminum foil,” said Forsman. The plastics, too, are sent for recycling.