Disposition Model – Getting rid of “all” of it

I would often tell my staff, “Find a home for it or get rid of it.”?They would look at me and ask “Why, we might need it.”?My reply, “…Because if you let it sit around, there will be a perception that we have plenty of IT equipment, (non-IT staff do not know that it is old equipment,) they just see IT equipment and think there is plenty of it.”?So that was my quest for years.?

?In the beginning Schools would take some of it. The good stuff they could use, but eventually Schools didn’t want it anymore. They had funding to purchase laptops and thin clients.?We tried to work with local e-waste vendors, but they would only take so much. They were not setup to take more than a few boxes at a time, their focus was on household e-waste, not commercial grade, and certainly not pallets of it.

Most commercial e-waste vendors charged a fee to come and pick it up.?Others would pay you for the equipment, but only if it was in good working order.?It took time to figure out what still worked and what didn’t.?You had to sanitize the hard drives, ensure the asset tags were removed, fill out reports to remove it and in the end, it was a lot of time and effort. Later only to find out that e-waste vendors wouldn’t take all the miscellaneous cords, power adapters, mice, and broken monitors that we had collected over the years.

We shut down our server room over twelve years ago, with a large room like this, it slowly became a storage room and a dumping ground for items that didn’t have a home.?We would put things in there with the intent to survey the equipment out, but it came in faster than it went out.?It was a combination of servers, networking gear, old cables and cords, power adapters, monitors, broken equipment, and things we just never got rid of.?Soon it reached a point of pushing the boundaries and we had to get rid of it, all of it.

I called my Service Solution Provider that had helped me out with problems before to see what they could do.?They surveyed the room and realized it was more than I had led them to believe but agreed to assist.?We came up with a timeline of when they would arrange pick up and the staff worked starting the task of getting it ready to go.

Two months later the day arrived, hard drives had been sanitized, asset tags removed, paperwork filled out and approved, boxes were on pallets, pallets were shrink wrapped, and staff were ready to assist.?The vendor worked hard to remove everything during the next few days and in the end, we pulled out almost 45 pallets of IT Equipment that had not been used in years.?

After that event, I sat back and realized we had come up with a potential model that I could use statewide.?I managed staff at numerous sites up and down the State. After communicating with them, I realized they all had the same problem that I did.?How to get rid of it all.?I sat down with the vendor, we discussed the potential for this effort, and what it would mean.?If I had 45 pallets what would the rest of the state have??100 pallets? ?200 pallets?? More??

In the meantime, the vendor whom I had been working with had to come up with a bigger solution. They had to find a partner that could take the mountain of e-waste that was now knocking at their door.?With a bit of luck, they were able to find one in the Bay Area, one that had the potential to take on a mountain and even more.?

A strategy was put in place to pick up e-waste when new equipment was being delivered.?This allowed the vendor to have a full truck both ways.?The team then worked to validate procedures, create schedules for pickup, ensure that everyone followed the guidelines to sanitize equipment, and know how to prepare the equipment for pickup.

It was overwhelming to see just how much old equipment was out there. I knew it was from all of my visits throughout the years. It was still amazing to get the calls come in for pickups, 10 pallets in the Central Valley, 25 pallets for the Bay Area, 40 pallets for the Southern Region, and 75 pallets for the High Sierras.?In the end, we moved 350 to 375 pallets of equipment out of the warehouses throughout the state, freeing up much needed space.?Earlier this year my team, was recognized for moving 350,000 pounds of IT equipment to the recycler.?It’s been an incredible effort, but one that has only just started, there is so much more out there.?