Stage one happens before a single machine leaves the rack. We pre-sort what is there, build our own asset register from what we can actually see, and cross-reference it line by line against the inventory you send us, because in our experience the two rarely match and it is far better to argue about it in your building than in an email six weeks later. Visible asset tags are removed so devices cannot be traced back to your company, and anything data bearing is crated and closed with tamper evident seals before it leaves the floor, with the seal numbers written onto the register. Where the estate is spread across floors or sites, we band and wrap servers four ways to pallets, which is how we shifted a European client's datacentre in Surrey back to our Heathrow warehouse.
Drives come out first. Make, model and serial are captured with a handheld barcode scanner, then the drives go through the HSM Powerline StoreEx HDS 150 at up to 210 an hour, cut to a 40mm strip at H-3, and the certificate of destruction is built from the scan rather than from a tally. Where a machine is being redeployed rather than scrapped, the drive is wiped to the NIST 800-88 standard and an erasure report issued instead. Laptops get dismantled properly, which means the SSD out and any swollen or faulty batteries out too, because those are a fire risk sitting on a pallet. We did exactly that job for a Dublin based customer decommissioning a whole London office, packed into our own flight cases and back to Heathrow.
What happens next depends on the kit. Anything with life left in it can be stored at Heathrow or Farnborough for redeployment, sold on, or donated, and we will hold it in the racking while your approvals grind through. Waste material goes to our approved precious metal refiners for extraction, and the rest goes to a regulated Approved Authorised Treatment Facility, which issues WEEE certification against the batch, and we can produce carbon and environmental reporting on the same batch if your sustainability team asks for it. Nothing goes to landfill. We are ISO 9001:2015 accredited for logistics services across Europe including waste disposal, and we are registered as a upper tier waste carrier, broker and dealer with the Environment Agency, Reg No CBDU551195.
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