Old company IT: sell, recycle or destroy?

Checkpoint-E · As of October 2026 · Reading time about 5 minutes

Every company regularly retires hardware. What happens to the devices then affects cost, data protection and the environment. Here are the three options compared.

The legal position in brief

Electrical equipment must not go into general waste. The Electrical and Electronic Equipment Act (ElektroG) governs separate collection and disposal. For devices from commercial use, owner and manufacturer are generally jointly responsible; take-back is often regulated by contract.

The Circular Economy Act also sets an order of priority: prevention first, then preparation for re-use, then recycling, then other recovery, and disposal only as a last resort. Continued use of working devices therefore comes before recycling.

Route 1: sell and reuse

• Advantages: proceeds instead of costs, longest service life, best environmental balance.
• Requirements: working devices, secure data erasure with proof, device locks removed.
• Suitable for: business laptops, PCs and servers from recent years, especially in large batches.

Route 2: recycling

• Advantages: raw materials such as copper, aluminium, gold and rare earths are recovered.
• Disadvantages: usually no proceeds, often costs for collection and disposal. Data erasure must be secured beforehand.
• Suitable for: faulty and very old devices, after removing usable spare parts.

Route 3: destruction

• Advantages: highest security for the data.
• Disadvantages: functional assets are destroyed, and destruction costs money.
• Suitable for: storage media with very high protection needs, or where internal policies prohibit reuse. Often it is enough to destroy only the drives and keep using the other devices. Destruction to DIN 66399 is handled by HDDLab hard drive destruction.

Checklist for decommissioning

1. Create an inventory list with serial numbers.
2. Remove devices from management systems (MDM, Autopilot, domain), clear BIOS passwords.
3. Define and document the data erasure procedure.
4. Offer working devices for purchase, list defective ones separately.
5. Keep the handover and erasure certificate.

Conclusion

For working company IT, selling after secure erasure is almost always the best solution: economical, legally sound and resource-efficient. Recycling and destruction are for what is truly no longer usable.