What to Consider When It’s Time to Upgrade Your Electronics

It’s a new year, for many of you this also means it’s the start of a new fiscal year. Budgets are being evaluated and money is being earmarked for various initiatives. What if we said you might be sitting on value you didn’t know was there? Now what if we told you that value was sitting in the old electronics you may be looking at replacing or upgrading? As we all know, in business cash really is king and leaving anything on the table no matter how big or small can make a difference. Here’s what you need to consider when your company or institution is upgrading their electronics:

Old IT Assets Are Not Garbage

Our entire industry is based around this simple idea. Electronics are not garbage – period. Obviously we say this because we’re concerned for our environment. The amount of e-waste produced across Canada has nearly tripled in the past four years, but there are other things to consider as well, especially for businesses and organizations. For instance, did you know all of those old electronic assets you’ve been meaning to replace can actually make your business money?

Value In E-Waste

Electronic assets (computers, cell phones, printers, hard drives, etc.) contain commodities (gold, silver, copper, etc.) that can provide value for your business when extracted by a reputable e-waste recycling company. As well, sometimes electronic assets are not quite at the end of their life cycle and don’t need to be destroyed, but are no longer of use to your business. In this case, you can expect that your e-waste solution provider will find new homes for those assets for the best prices. Which leads to our final point…

Depreciation Timeline

The longer you sit on old electronics trying to figure out what to do with them, the less valuable they become. In fact, value in IT assets depreciates quite quickly. In 5 years a $1 million server can be worth less than 5% of that, so the sooner you can work with an e-waste recycling team after taking your electronics offline the better. At the end of the day it’s a big, costly decision to make to upgrade electronics in an office or company-wide setting. However, we think it’s also clear that it can be costly when you don’t have the right information to make an informed decision around what to do with the old assets. We hope the information above has given you some things to think about when it comes to e-waste recycling and the positive effects it can have on your business’ or institution’s bottom line.

As always, if there are any questions leave us a comment or get in touch at info@greentec.com – we hope to hear from you!

CASE STUDY

How the University of Waterloo & Greentec are leading the way in asset disposal

UW partnered with Greentec, whose tailored solutions ensured secure data destruction, environmental responsibility, and regulatory compliance, to collaboratively transform its IT asset disposal process.

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