While electronic gadgets are not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of “trash”, they are as polluting and as dangerous as oil patches and your local landfill. Now, the gadgets we all use and love require special treatment, be it an old HDD or a CRT monitor. This is ensured by applying the principles of IT asset management and focusing on the beneficial role of recycling in this process. Despite its prevalence, IT asset recycling still needs to be properly understood to make it easier to introduce it to your best industry practices and pick out just the right provider for this job.
Can you recover your investments?
IT asset recycling is a structured approach that describes the methods in which these assets are procured, deployed, transported, managed, and tracked down as part of an organized process. Keeping an eye on an organization’s IT assets once they are disposed of at their facilities is a priority for many stakeholders.
The reasons for it are many, but the most important one includes the desire to avoid having poor asset management practices hurt your bottom line. This is a genuine risk in case these devices stay with you for longer than they can either scale with your needs or perform their functions.
Instead of this, you can profit from recycling your IT assets, as long as you or your service provider know when and how the assets are decommissioned, redeployed, placed on the market, and recycled following the data sanitization.
A portion of what you invested in these assets can be recovered by implementing a fully trackable, secure, accountable, and fully compliant process. In addition, the better organized this process is, the larger the percentage of the initial investments that can be recovered. One of the key prerequisites for doing this is finding the right partner/service provider in this process. Thus, it’s best to start out by having a clear picture of what the IT asset recycling process actually involves.
What Does IT Recycling Process Entail?
This process covers several steps.
1. Asset collection is the first step in the IT asset recycling process. It consists of the physical collection of IT devices at the checkpoints designated for this purpose, at recycling facilities, or as part of a dedicated recycling program. These are the places at which your disused IT assets will be separated in bulk by their type so as to streamline the entire recycling process.
2. Asset storage is the second step and is essential for the security segment of the process. Adequate storage is an essential prerequisite for preventing negative environmental impact or contamination risks.
3. Asset sorting involves the separation of individual physical and mechanical components from various devices and systems. Some assets may be shredded into tiny pieces to support easier sorting of ensuing material.
4. Separation of assets involves more specialized processes such as mechanical, magnetic, and water separation.
5. Asset Recovery. Once the IT assets undergo all of the above stages, the resulting electronic waste is sent to the recycling facilities at which valuable resources such as precious metals will be extracted from the assets.
