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It’s a true family operation, says Dave, 45, explaining that their 18-year-old son Ryker, a student at Portland Community College, works in the store three days a week. And Frankie, 44, has a specialty that keeps her in the warehouse a lot.

“She does all our laptops,” he says. “Tears them apart and puts them back together.” “I absolutely love working on laptops, taking them apart,” says Frankie.

The Baxes have another son at the University of Oregon and a married daughter in Seattle.

There is ample evidence that even though EcoBinary deals in high-tech gear and mechani-cal parts, the company has a heart.

“Our focus is corporate IT recycling,” says Dave, but they also offer the general public the opportunity to drop off their old stuff for free. “We also do a lot of work with nonprofits,” he says.

And, although none of the items sold in the store comes with a guarantee or warranty, the Baxes run the business the same hand-shake sort of way any small-town business person would operate.

“If they have a problem, we’ll take care of it,” he vows.

“A lot of it is just treating people right, and getting referrals, so we get a lot of repeat busi-ness,” he adds. “It’s kind of a domino effect.”

And that, he points out, is how they continue to get new clients.

“Coming out of IT, I know a lot of people in the field.” And, with a smile, he adds, “We’ve helped a lot of companies move out of this business park” — and that has added to EcoBinary’s business.

Who’s the typical customer coming in the store? No such thing, says Dave.

“It varies, from the general public to IT profession-als,” he says. “We get pretty much all walks of life com-ing in here.”

“We get a lot of referrals from businesses, so that tells us their employees must have been in here shopping.” The store’s inventory runs the gamut from Apple to Microsoft products, but there are things you won’t find. “We carry a little bit of software, but we don’t really deal in the software side of things,” says Dave. “We also don’t sell certain items. We don’t sell hard drives, so there’s no danger of somebody’s data getting out there.”

But service is a key element of EcoBinary.

“One of the things that we do is, we can do onsite mobile hard drive destruction,” says Dave, adding that they also operate their own little network in the ware-house for “drive wipes,” done to DOD standards. “We just got picked up on the Oregon E-Cycles pro-gram,” boasts Dave. “For that, you need to be in good standing.”

For more on the company, visit ecobinary.com.