By Kassi Filkins, Signal Akron
Thousands of defunct electric scooters sit stacked more than six feet high outside of the low-slung yellow brick industrial building that houses Summit e-Waste Recycling Solutions, an electronics recycling facility.
Ben Baker, owner and vice president of the company located on Grant Street, took on the task of refurbishing thousands of the distinctively orange-red scooters
“We share warehouse space here with Spin,” Baker said. “And they approached us over the summer and said they had all these scooters that they needed to get rid of and would we recycle them? And I said, ‘Yeah, we want to recycle them.’ But it was my intent to recycle them via refurbishment rather than scrapping them out.”
Baker and a small group of employees are working to give the scooters a second life by sanding them down, painting them flat black and replacing the grip tape on the boards. He said he knew he could always recycle them, but it was a big deal – and a bit of a gamble – to get the scooters spruced up and running for individual use.
Software and Hardware from scratch
It has taken more than just a paint job and new grip tape. Valentin Batut, lead technician for the recycling facility, created a brand new circuit board for the scooters so they could be used outside of the Spin app.
There was no available online software to reset the scooters to factory settings. “So we had to essentially write our own software from scratch and design our hardware,” Baker said, “to put the software on to run these scooters.”
The nearly 8,000 scooters housed at Summit e-Waste were previously stored in a Cleveland warehouse awaiting recycling. But after lawyers for the City of Cleveland complained the scooter’s lithium-ion batteries posed a fire hazard, Spin agreed to move them out of the Lakeside Avenue warehouse space.
Baker’s team went from having several months to just one week to get the scooters from Cleveland to Akron. Fortunately, a friend of Baker’s has a logistics company that provided trucks so they could move quickly.
In total, it took seven semi trucks, a box truck and three trailers running back and forth to get the nearly 8,000 scooters to their new Akron home.
Baker is selling the refurbished scooters for $200 each. He set the price based on other electric scooters on the market. “It’s as cheap as one of the lower-quality scooters that you can buy online,” he said, “but they’re actually good quality.”
Making the sale
A viral TikTok, combined with news coverage about the Cleveland warehouse, has created a wave of excited customers all over the country.
“We’ve had a lot of students buying them; we’ve had just average people who just want to buy them and go out and cruise around and discover. Like even here in downtown Akron, it’s great,” Baker said. “You can go out and get up in all the alleyways and the side streets and find small businesses that you’ve never known have existed, which is one of the best things for me.”
He also has plans to connect with local organizations to see if they would be interested in donated scooters for guided scooter tours, such as the soon-to-open Akron History Center, or to ride around and intermingle more during events, like the Akron Police Department.
But right now they’re just trying to keep up with demand, prioritizing local sales.
“I just didn’t plan on the middle of winter for this demand,” Baker said. “Even in the last few days it’s been like five degrees – yesterday morning [we had] a dozen cars lined up out here at 8 a.m. And then the scooters are sold in an hour.”
The scooters have a top speed of 22 miles per hour, which can be adjusted to a slower top speed, and are controlled by a smartphone. The scooters also have a headlight and taillight.
Baker advises practicing safety when riding the scooters, such as wearing a helmet, long pants and close-toed shoes.
