Every few months our team ends up with a pile of dead hardware — old drives, dead laptops, tangled cables, a drawer full of phones nobody will ever use again. For a while most of it just sat in a cupboard because no one was quite sure what to actually do with it.
Lately we’ve been trying to be more deliberate about recycling the tech we retire — wiping drives properly first, then finding real e-waste channels instead of letting it head to landfill. Honestly it’s been harder than expected to figure out the “right” way to do it, especially with anything that once held company data.
Curious how the rest of you handle this:
Do you have an actual process for retiring and recycling old hardware, or is it more ad-hoc?
How do you deal with securely wiping data before things leave the building?
Any recyclers or programs you’d genuinely recommend — or ones to avoid?
Feels like one of those things every team deals with but nobody really talks about. Would love to hear how others manage it.