Working with a University in the E Waste Business.
I've been quite honestly trying to push out the current e waste contract provider for myself for about six months, at least where I am located. I finally got an in that basically states: In order to get around the current contract I have to purchase electronics for "refurbishing". Long story to that but let me explain a bit. I meet with campus IT department to discuss e waste, they tell me it's not gonna happen because it's contracted which includes data destruction. I go to the trouble of purchasing an accepted NAID/DoD wipe program And a method of physical drive destruction. It then becomes "You cannot accept anything we give you as scrap BUT we can sell you computers and servers through our "store" (yes they have a store). At this point, I've been to the campus store and none of it is priced appropriate for scrap OR refurbishing on a wholesale scale. I tell the IT department as much. It's going to be a run on paragraph so bare with me. So they tell me well, how about you go through what we have and mark what you would like to buy and we will send it to the store for you to purchase. I'm thinking sure...but then the price will be outrageous. So I mark about 4 or 5 pallets worth of computers, I spend an entire day marking computers and servers I want to buy...Cherry picking multi processor workstations and servers figuring if I have to pay the store prices I need the best material. Anyways a few days goes by, one of the guys calls me to tell me the pallets are at the store so next time they are open I can go down and pay for the pallets, the people there should know it's for me.
Fast forward to Tuesday: I arrive in hopes of buying these workstations and servers for 10 ea or slightly more if I have to. The worker informs me each pallet is marked for $100. There are around 35 workstations per pallet and some have tall stacks of server blades shrink wrapped up. So I smiled, paid $500 and spent the entire day taking one pallet at a time to the shop so I could unload and repeat. Some of these machines are LGA771 Xeon machines and probably reuseable, a very nice score. I'm a happy man and as it happens the IT department is happy too because the university has to PAY to get rid of their E Waste...
Moral is...sometimes you can and should bend a rule. I'm persistant to the point of annoying sometimes but if I want it bad enough I'm going to try my hardest to get it.
To get such large contracts I will need a much larger liability policy than I have now and a secure storage for data, a serialized method of destruction so the university can get a receipt for confirmation purposes. I will have to produce a price sheet for the duration of the contract, so far I believe I can just accept material for zero charge at all and that will offset additional costs for insurance and process requirements.
