What happens when you collect?
Organising a collection is simple. Give us a call or send us an email and we will arrange the best time for you for collection.
When we arrive, we will note down what waste we are collection onto a ‘Waste Transfer Note’. This document is to be signed by both parties to simply declare that the responsibility of the waste has been transferred over to licensed party – that would be us! You will receive a copy also. This also have all our licensing information detailed too. It is recommended you keep this with your asset list/equipment audit, so it clearly states that your decommissioned equipment was disposed of correctly.
We aim to collect as quickly as possible when we are on site, we don’t want to disturb you. You can help us by accumulating all the waste equipment in one place near an ground floor exit where we can get easy access to with our vehicle or a flatbed trolley. Please take a look at What We Collect to see what items we can collect.
What happens when you reuse equipment?
We operate on a policy that states if equipment is still functioning, and is not completely obsolete beyond economic repair, we will attempt to refurbish it. Sometimes we will use working parts to repair other equipment. It is much more environmentally friendly to reuse equipment, as it requires considerably less energy than the metals and plastic recovery process.
We take data security VERY seriously. We know how important it is to everyone. Before we even begin the reuse or recycling process, we wipe every hard disk drive and solid-state storage with standalone hardware (not software which can expose data) with NIST SP 800-88 standard. This particular standard invokes the best multiple pass wiping process, which is set by the manufacturer of the storage. If drive fails, we physically destroy the drive and disks. NONE of your data will get past us.
What happens when you recycle equipment?
Desktop computers and laptops each contain small amount of valuable metals and materials. These are stripped down by hand to circuit boards, heat sinks, fans, cables, power supplies, plastics, metal chassis, screens, fixings, drives etc. These are all segregated carefully, then passed on to our network of recyclers, who can extract the raw materials with little or no waste. We make sure that every part gets recycled, and none of your waste ends up in landfill.
With regards to printers, we extract the old cartridges and donate them to a variety of charities. They have the ability or means to sort them, clean, refill and sell them. Not only are they recycling, which we like, they are doing some great work in many causes, which we also like!
CRTs are kept aside. These big bulky screens are no longer popular now we have LCD/LED monitors and TVs. Because of their contruction, they are also quite difficult and expensive to recycle. So much so that the energy required to recycle them is actually more expensive than the value of the raw materials extracted from them. Because of this, we operate a policy where we can only collect 5 CRT screens per collection, and must be collected with other computer waste. The reason we do this is so we can keep our collections free of charge for you.
Some items are passed on for processing as whole units. Our network of recyclers are able to segregate the plastics, metals and other materials mechanically using a variety of some incredible machinery.