IT asset disposal is an unusual purchase: the thing you are buying is mostly the absence of a future problem, which makes it very hard to judge on the day. These are the questions worth asking — including of us.
Start here. Every business transporting waste in England must be registered, the register is public, and checking takes under a minute. A supplier who cannot give you a number cannot lawfully move your waste. Ours is CBDU622766.
Look for a named standard rather than reassurance. "We wipe everything" is not a standard. "NIST 800-88 Rev 2 Purge, using Blancco, verified and certified per device" is. Ask what happens to drives that fail mid-process, because that is where sloppy operators cut corners.
A quiet competence test. Degaussing does nothing to flash memory, so any supplier offering to degauss your SSDs has revealed they do not understand the media. See our guide to NIST 800-88 for why.
Aggregate weights prove nothing about individual devices. Ask for serialised reporting and per-device certificates. Then ask the follow-up: if I ring you in eighteen months with one asset tag, how long will it take you to tell me what happened to it?
Every zero-landfill claim depends on the weakest operator in the downstream chain. Ask what standards downstream partners are held to. Ours must hold licences and certifications equivalent to or better than our own.
A supplier processing your data should be willing to show you where. If a visit is discouraged or endlessly deferred, that is information. You are welcome at our Sowerby Bridge facility — several clients in regulated sectors visit before signing anything off, and we would rather they did.
Certification claims are easy to make and rarely checked. Ask for certificate numbers and verify them with the issuing body.
Our own position, stated plainly: we are working toward ISO certification, not claiming it. Our ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 audits are booked and we are awaiting the site visit, with ISO 27001 to follow. What we hold today is EA Upper Tier Waste Carrier registration CBDU622766, T11 and S2 waste exemptions, and ICO registration ZC107193 — all publicly verifiable. A supplier who overstates accreditation is a risk to your audit, not an asset to it.
Free collection is genuine but conditional. The question that matters is when you find out about exceptions — locked devices, end-of-life equipment, items outside scope. Before, or on the invoice? We send the list of locked devices before any charge applies, so you can release them first.
Plenty of national providers are brokers routing your job to whoever is nearest. That is not inherently wrong, but you should know who is turning up, whether they are vetted, and whose chain of custody you are relying on. Ask directly.
A minor point that reveals how a supplier thinks. A van with "IT DISPOSAL" down the side parked outside your office advertises that valuable, data-bearing equipment is being loaded into it. Ours are unmarked and GPS-tracked.
The cost of a collection is trivial next to the cost of a breach traced back to a disposed asset — or an enforcement action for waste that ended up somewhere it should not have. Judging this purchase on price alone optimises the smallest variable in the equation.
Call us and ask. We would rather give you a straight answer than a brochure — even if the answer is that you do not need us.
Call 01422 416821 →NIST 800-88 Purge wiping, degaussing and shredding, with a certificate per device.
Learn more →Zero-to-landfill treatment of IT electronic waste through licensed partners.
Learn more →Serialised audit trails and environmental data your ESG and audit teams can use.
Learn more →Why some collections are free, when they are not, and the charges that catch people out.
Read →What the law actually requires when business IT leaves your building, and how to check a supplier is licensed.
Read →Clear, Purge and Destroy in plain English — and why degaussing an SSD does nothing at all.
Read →Step-by-step for Intune, Autopilot, Entra ID, Apple Business Manager and iCloud.
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