Bit Clean was founded by a team with nearly two decades of hands-on experience in e-waste recycling across Colorado.

Over the years, we have worked closely with commercial properties, supporting electronics recycling through building collection programs, facility drop-offs, and on-site events such as Earth Day drives. From large-scale equipment to full-building systems, we’ve helped manage the entire lifecycle of electronics — collection, logistics, data destruction, reuse, and recycling.

We’ve seen real progress. Mostly electronics are increasingly captured through structured recycling programs.

But one gap kept standing out: cellphones were missing.

Even in buildings with active recycling systems, collection boxes were full - yet only a handful of phones ever appeared, sometimes none at all.

One moment made this especially clear: An elderly woman once drove nearly an hour - over thirty miles, just to recycle a single old Nokia phone. After handing it over, she kept saying “thank you.” She told us how difficult it had been to find a place that would accept it, and she din't want to just throw it into a bin.

That experience stayed with us - because recycling a cellphone shouldn’t be so hard.

The EPA data reflects what we observed: despite billions of devices in circulation, cellphone recycling rates remain low - fewer than 1 in 5 phones are ever recycled, in some states, such as California, that figure drops to around 13%, limiting both material recovery and measurable environmental impact.

We spent years studying this gap and reached a simple conclusion: the problem isn’t willingness - it’s access.

Traditional systems are designed for large electronics and centralized collection. Phones require a different approach - one that is accessible, secure, and built into everyday environments.

That led to the development of our compact, indoor cellphone recycling kiosk - an IoT-enabled system designed to capture devices where people already are, while generating trackable data to support sustainability reporting and ESG initiatives, with potential alignment to LEED-related goals.

This is the foundation of our distributed recycling concept - bringing accessible, measurable recycling into everyday spaces. That's Bit Clean.