Drive through Lehi today and you will pass glass office campuses for some of the biggest names in software. Fifteen years ago, most of that same ground was orchards and farmland. Utah County did not slowly develop into a technology hub over generations. It happened fast, and it is still happening, which is part of why the county now generates so much electronic waste every single year.
From Farmland To Fortune 500 Neighbors
Lehi was incorporated in 1852 and stayed an agricultural community for about 148 years afterward (CNBC, 2024). The city that Utah residents now associate with Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft campuses was, within living memory, mostly orchards.
The turning point traces back to 2009, when Adobe acquired the Utah based analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion. That deal gave Adobe a reason to build a permanent presence in Utah, and in 2012 the company opened a 280,000 square foot building in Lehi. A decade later, in 2022, Adobe added a second phase covering another 162,000 square feet (CNBC, 2024). One local business leader put it simply: Adobe laid the foundation for tech to grow and explode into what it is today (CNBC, 2024).
That explosion has been real. Silicon Slopes, the informal name for the tech corridor stretching along the Wasatch Front, now includes more than 1,000 companies (CNBC, 2024). A meaningful share of them sit in Lehi alone, including Podium, Ancestry.com, Weave, Divvy, and Boostability, all companies that built their headquarters in a city that spent nearly a century and a half as farmland.
The Roots Go Back Further Than Lehi
Lehi gets a lot of the current attention, but Utah County's tech story actually starts decades earlier, just a few miles south in Orem.
In 1979, Brigham Young University computer science professor Alan Ashton partnered with graduate student Bruce Bastian to build a word processor for the city of Orem's government computer system. That project became WordPerfect, and by the mid 1980s it was the dominant word processing software in the country, at one point fielding around 8,000 support calls a week from its Orem offices (Chapman, 2015). WordPerfect eventually sold to Novell, another Utah software company, for close to a billion dollars in 1994 (Chapman, 2015).
Novell itself started small in Orem before outgrowing the space and building a much larger campus in nearby Provo, with construction beginning in 1986. As one retrospective on the era put it, the spirit of WordPerfect still exists in the many companies that former employees went on to start throughout Utah County, and the region's reputation as a software development hub has never really gone away since (Chapman, 2015). Add in Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University, both steady sources of engineering and computer science graduates, and Orem and Provo have been feeding Utah County's tech economy since long before Lehi entered the picture.
Pleasant Grove And American Fork Caught The Wave Too
The growth did not stop at the biggest cities. Pleasant Grove, sitting along the Interstate 15 corridor in northern Utah County, has become home to national and international businesses like doTERRA and Close To My Heart, along with newer tech startups such as Fortem Technologies and Whistic. Its location, close to both Salt Lake City and the university communities of Provo and Orem, has made it an increasingly attractive spot for companies looking to expand.
American Fork has its own cluster of business parks, including North Pointe and the Utah Valley Business Park, home to companies like Domo, Certiport, and Fidelity Investments. Domo in particular has grown into one of Utah County's most recognizable technology companies, built entirely in a city that, like its neighbors, spent most of its history centered on agriculture rather than software.
Growth This Fast Means Nonstop Hardware Turnover
All of this growth is not slowing down. Utah County gained more than 21,000 residents in a single year, making it the 30th fastest growing county in the entire country, while the Provo, Orem, and Lehi metro area tied as the fifth fastest growing metro area in the nation by percentage (Willis, 2025). Roughly 60 percent of that growth comes from people moving in rather than births, and researchers point to the concentration of schools and businesses as a major draw for young professionals (Willis, 2025).
Every one of those new residents and new companies needs computers, servers, networking equipment, and office hardware, and none of that hardware lasts forever. Businesses replace laptops, workstations, and IT infrastructure on a regular cycle to keep up with security requirements and performance demands, and that pattern is a major reason the market for properly disposing of retired IT equipment was valued at $28.3 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $65.7 billion by 2033 (Grand View Research, 2026). A county adding tens of thousands of new residents and new business tenants every year is a county generating a steady, growing stream of retired electronics that need somewhere responsible to go.
Why Zap Specializes In IT Equipment And Secure Data Destruction
Fast growing tech companies do not just generate more electronic waste, they generate more sensitive electronic waste. Startups and established software companies alike run on servers, workstations, and networking equipment loaded with proprietary code, customer data, and internal records. When that hardware reaches the end of its life, simply hauling it to a landfill is not an option, and neither is handing it off to a recycler that treats data destruction as an afterthought.
That is exactly where Zap Recycling specializes. We handle the full range of IT equipment, from desktops and laptops to servers, server rack equipment, and networking hardware, and every device that requires data destruction is wiped or physically destroyed using NIST 800 88 approved methods, the federal standard used by government agencies and enterprise IT departments across the country (NIST Computer Security Resource Center, 2025). Depending on the device, that means a certified overwrite, physical destruction, or degaussing, verified and documented so businesses have a clear paper trail for compliance purposes (Blancco, 2023).
We Come To You
Utah County businesses do not have time to box up a server room and drive it across town. That is why Zap Recycling comes directly to your location, whether you are a startup in Lehi clearing out a handful of old laptops or an established company in Provo decommissioning an entire server rack. The process is simple from first contact to final pickup, and most customers, over 83%, qualify for a free pickup.
Whether you are in Provo, Orem, Lehi, Pleasant Grove, American Fork, or anywhere else in Utah County, submit an inquiry and see if you qualify. Fast growth built this county. Responsible recycling should keep up with it.
Schedule a pickup at zaprecycling.com and let us handle the rest.
References
Blancco. (2023, May 18). What is NIST 800 88, and what does "media sanitization" really mean?https://blancco.com/resources/blog-what-is-nist-800-88-media-sanitization/
Chapman, G. (2015, December 9). Utah inventions: WordPerfect led the PC word processing market for almost 10 years. KSL.com. https://www.ksl.com/article/37693913/utah-inventions-wordperfect-led-the-pc-word-processing-market-for-almost-10-years
CNBC. (2024, December 10). How Utah's Silicon Slopes tech sector is making a run at Silicon Valley.https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/10/utahs-silicon-slopes-tech-sector-is-making-a-run-at-silicon-valley.html
Grand View Research. (2026). IT asset disposition market size and share report, 2026 to 2033.https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/it-asset-disposition-market
NIST Computer Security Resource Center. (2025, September 26). NIST Special Publication 800 88 Rev. 2: Guidelines for media sanitization. https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/88/r2/final
Utah Valley Information. (n.d.). American Fork, Utah community profile. https://www.utahvalleyinformation.com/site-selector-toolbox/community-profiles/american-fork/
Willis, B. (2025, March 17). Utah County continues to lead the state, and the country, in population growth. KSL NewsRadio. https://kslnewsradio.com/utah/utah-county-leads-population-growth/2193700/