Desktops, laptops, servers and the drives inside them. We take the machine apart, destroy or wipe whatever held data, separate the gold, copper, aluminium and steel into real recovery streams, and send you a report that names every asset by serial number.
Three details to start. We come back with the route, the data plan, and what the hardware is worth.
Recycling a computer is not one process, it is nine. Click a component to see what is recovered from it and which part of it can get you in trouble.
Click a component
HDD platters and aluminium, NAND flash, rare-earth magnets, steel bodies
The only part of the machine that can leak. Wiped to NIST 800-88 and verified, or shredded to particles — your call, certificate either way, listed by serial number. The magnets in a spinning drive are neodymium, which is worth recovering properly.
Gold on the contacts and edge connectors, copper layers, palladium in capacitors, tin solder
Boards carry firmware and, on business machines, sometimes onboard flash storage. They come out whole and go to a smelter that actually recovers precious metals, rather than a shredder that burns them off into slag.
Gold bonding wire and pins, silicon die, copper heat spreader, aluminium fins
Pulled and kept in their own stream. Processors are one of the few components dense enough in gold to be worth handling individually rather than shredding with the board.
Gold fingers, copper, aluminium heatsink, memory chips
This is where the resale value usually hides. If your cards are worth something we tell you the figure and credit it against the job, rather than quietly reselling them. Ask for destruction only and we honour that instead.
Copper transformer windings, steel housing, aluminium, more copper in the loom
The densest copper in the machine, which is why a PSU is one of the few parts that reliably pays for its own processing. Capacitors are discharged before anything is opened.
Steel, aluminium panels, some ABS plastics — and one small lithium coin cell
The coin cell comes out first. A lithium cell going through a shredder is exactly how recycling facility fires start, and it is the single most common thing general haulers miss.
Everything with a processor in it, plus the things plugged into it. No brand restrictions, no minimum for mail-in.
Any age, any brand, working or dead. Leave the drive in for a certified wipe or pull it and keep it — say which on the form.
Wipe or shredIncluding ones with swollen batteries, which need to be flagged rather than posted. Working machines with resale value are valued before anything is destroyed.
Resale valuedBlades, chassis, rails, SANs, UPS units. For a full rack we decommission in place and palletise on site.
On-site serviceHDDs, SSDs, NVMe, tapes, USB sticks, SD cards. SSDs we recommend shredding — overwriting flash is less predictable than people assume.
NIST 800-88LCD, LED and the occasional CRT still lurking in a store cupboard. Over 32 inches it goes on a pickup rather than in a box.
CRTs acceptedSwitches, routers, firewalls, access points, NAS units. Factory-reset them or let us — configs and credentials count as data.
Configs wipedKeyboards, mice, docks, monitors arms, power leads and the drawer of unidentified adapters. Copper pays its own way.
Always freeTerminals, kiosks, card readers and POS units. These hold more than people expect and are routinely skipped in an audit.
Often missedAll three are legitimate and all three produce paperwork. What differs is who has custody at the moment the data stops existing — and for some organisations that is the only question that matters.
The drive survives and the machine can be resold or redeployed. Overwritten to NIST SP 800-88 and then verified — the step that gets skipped — with a pass/fail record per serial number.
Collected under a signed chain-of-custody manifest and destroyed to particles. Photographic confirmation on request, and the shredded material still goes to metal recovery.
The shredder comes to you. Drives never leave your building intact, and your own staff can watch every one go in. This is the option that ends the conversation with an auditor.
A certification badge on a recycler’s website tells you how they run their business. It does not tell you what happened to your drive. Ask for the certificate with the serial numbers on it — from us or from anyone else.
A refresh of four hundred machines is a logistics job wrapped around a compliance job. Most vendors are good at one of those.
IT departments mid-refresh, schools and districts, clinics and practices under HIPAA, finance and legal under retention rules, MSPs decommissioning on behalf of clients, and anyone who has just been asked to produce evidence for last year.
Bulk shredding turns a motherboard into confetti that a smelter can barely separate. Taking the machine apart first costs us more labour and returns more material — and it is the only way the resale figure we quote you is real.
Any hauler can put a pallet of PCs on a truck. The questions worth asking are what happens to the drives, what happens to the boards, and whether anyone writes it down.
We refreshed 380 machines over a summer and the thing that saved us was the inventory being taken at our site before anything left. Two boxes were miscounted by our own team and it surfaced on day one instead of in November.
They quoted us a resale figure on about forty of the laptops, in writing, before touching anything. We had been told for years that old hardware was worthless. It was not.
On-site shredding with our compliance officer standing there watching. That was the entire requirement and nobody else would do it for a job our size.
No, and this is the most common mistake we see. A format rewrites the index, not the data, and a factory reset on an older machine leaves files recoverable with free software. Modern encrypted drives are a better case because the reset throws away the key — but unless you can confirm the drive was encrypted, treat it as readable.
Flash memory uses wear levelling, which means the controller moves data around and keeps spare blocks the operating system cannot address. A conventional overwrite may leave those blocks untouched. Manufacturer secure-erase commands usually work, but they are implemented inconsistently, so for anything sensitive we would rather shred than argue about firmware.
Laptops, desktops, servers and peripherals are generally free to recycle — we recover the cost from materials and resale. Monitors over 32 inches, CRTs and jobs needing on-site shredding or a tail lift carry a charge that depends on volume and access. You get a written number before anything is booked.
Sometimes, and we will tell you plainly when we do not. Machines roughly five years old or newer, decent laptops, GPUs and server gear often carry real value. A ten-year-old tower does not, and anyone telling you otherwise is building the disappointment into the deal.
Yes. The shredder comes to your premises, your staff watch, and drives never leave the building intact. It costs more than facility shredding and for regulated data it is usually worth it.
Components are separated rather than bulk-shredded. Boards, processors and drives go to smelters that recover precious metals; aluminium, steel and copper go into commodity streams; plastics are separated by polymer where the grade allows. No equipment is exported for informal dismantling.
No. Use the free mail-in label. You do not need an account and there is no minimum — and if the drive matters to you, pull it out and keep it, which is free and certain.
Stop charging it and stop using the machine. Do not post it. Put it somewhere non-flammable away from anything that burns, and tell us on the form — we will send the right packaging or collect it separately.
Free prepaid labels reach all fifty states. Scheduled pickups, rack decommissioning and on-site shredding run through these metros and the counties around them.
Tell us what you are decommissioning and how many. You get the route, the data plan, what the hardware is worth, and the soonest date we can be there.
Computer, laptop and server recycling with certified data destruction. Machines dismantled into real recovery streams, drives wiped or shredded, everything reported by serial number.