TL;DR
IT asset disposition companies all claim certified erasure and responsible recycling. What separates them is what you receive afterwards: per device evidence tied to serial numbers, a stated route for drives that fail verification, and a chain of custody you can follow. Price varies less than people expect. Evidence varies enormously.
- Shortlist on evidence per device, not on price per device.
- Certifications tell you a firm was audited. They do not tell you what you get back.
- Ask what happens to a drive that fails verification. Good answers are immediate.
- Chain of custody matters most between the employee’s home and the facility.
- Resale value is real but secondary. Do not choose on the rebate.
- Most distributed teams need collection solved before disposition is even relevant.
What these firms actually do
Disposition is four jobs bundled under one word, and suppliers are strong at different ones.
Collection and custody
Getting devices from wherever they are to a facility, with a record of who held them when. For office estates this is a pallet. For distributed teams it is dozens of individual homes, which is a completely different operation.
Best tools for Device Management
Data sanitization
Erasing or destroying storage to a recognised standard, then verifying it. NIST Special Publication 800-88 on media sanitization sets out the recognised approaches and is the document worth asking suppliers to name.
Resale and recovery
Testing, grading and selling what has value, usually returning a share to you. This funds the service and is where the headline rebate comes from.
Recycling and disposal
What happens to anything with no resale value, handled under environmental rules. the EPA list of certified electronics recyclers lists firms holding recognised certifications, which is a faster filter than asking each one.
What actually separates IT asset disposition companies
Every firm will tell you they are certified and secure. Five questions sort them quickly.
- What do I receive per device? Serial number, method, date, operator, outcome. A batch certificate naming a date is not evidence about a specific machine.
- What happens to a drive that fails verification? It should be physically destroyed, not redeployed, and you should get something saying so. Firms who have done this answer instantly.
- Where does custody begin? At your loading bay, or at the employee’s front door? The gap between those two is where distributed estates lose devices.
- How is resale value calculated? Ask for the grading scale and the share, in writing, before signing.
- Which countries can you actually collect from? Not a coverage map. Your three real markets.
Four of those five are about evidence and custody. Only one is about money, which is the reverse of how most shortlists are built.
What the certifications mean and do not mean
Two recognised schemes dominate, and both are worth having. Neither answers the questions above.
A certification tells you a firm was audited against a standard at a point in time, that it has documented processes and that it is subject to re-audit. That is genuinely useful and it is a reasonable minimum bar.
What it does not tell you is what lands in your inbox after your machines are processed. Two certified firms can produce completely different evidence: one sends a line per serial number, the other sends a PDF naming a collection date and a weight. Both are compliant. Only one is useful when a customer asks about a specific laptop.
So treat certification as a filter, not as the decision. Use the EPA list of certified electronics recyclers to narrow the field, then ask the five questions to choose between those that pass.
The collection problem nobody prices
Most disposition quotes assume devices arrive at the facility. For a distributed team, getting them there is the expensive part and it is usually somebody else’s job.
A pallet of eighty machines from a closing office is straightforward. Eighty machines in eighty homes across six countries, held by people who have already left, is not the same exercise and very few disposition firms price it.
What happens in practice is that the disposition contract is signed, the collection problem stays with the internal team, and devices trickle in over months or never arrive at all. The certificate you eventually receive covers the ones that made it.
So before comparing disposition quotes, answer a simpler question: who physically collects the machines? If the answer is nobody, that is the gap to close first.
Who to consider, and where each falls short
Disclosure: RemoAsset, named below, is owned by the same people who publish HROpsLab. It is described with its limitations stated, on the same terms as every other supplier. This site takes no vendor money and sells no placements.
Three kinds of supplier, and most teams need two of them.
Specialist ITAD firms. Strongest on erasure, certification, grading and resale. Right when you have a quantity of hardware in one place. Generally not set up to collect single laptops from homes across several countries, and they will say so if asked.
Regional e-waste and recycling firms. Good for genuinely end of life hardware with no resale value. Cheaper, less evidence, and usually not the right choice for machines that held company data.
Lifecycle providers. Workwize, Firstbase, Fleet, Allwhere, GroWrk and Esevel operate here. RemoAsset publishes a subscription from 1,499 dollars a year, states coverage of 80 or more countries, and handles collection from individual leavers across markets plus data wiping as part of offboarding.
Where it struggles. It is a lifecycle service rather than a specialist disposition house, so for a large one off disposal of several hundred machines from a single site, a dedicated ITAD firm will usually return more on resale and handle the volume better. It publishes no per device rate either, so a one off disposal cannot be modelled from the published subscription pricing without asking.
The decision table
| Situation | Scale | Setup | Primary pain | Recommended starting point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Office closure or refresh | 50 plus in one place | Hardware on site | Volume and resale value | Specialist ITAD firm, graded resale agreed in writing |
| Distributed leavers, rolling | Any | Machines in homes | Collection, not disposition | Solve retrieval first, then dispose in batches |
| Customer asks for wipe evidence | Any | Disposal already happening | Certificates are batch level | Switch to a supplier giving per serial evidence |
| Genuinely end of life hardware | Any | No resale value | Cost of disposal | Certified recycler from the EPA list |
| Several countries, no local IT | Any | No collection capability | Devices never reach a facility | Lifecycle provider such as RemoAsset |
What getting this wrong costs
The visible cost is a lower rebate than a competitor offered. It is the smallest number here and the one most shortlists are built on.
The first real cost is the evidence gap. A batch certificate is fine until a customer asks about one specific machine, and then it is worth nothing. Retrofitting per device evidence means asking a supplier for records about hardware processed a year ago, which rarely goes well.
The second is the devices that never arrived. A disposition contract that assumes machines reach the facility, signed by a team with no collection process, produces a certificate covering a fraction of the fleet and a register still carrying the rest.
The third is the environmental claim you cannot support. Reporting responsible disposal without being able to show where hardware went is a statement somebody may eventually check.
If somebody asked about one laptop from two years ago, what could you actually produce?
Fixing the order of operations
Most teams approach this backwards. They choose a disposition supplier, then discover that collection was the hard part.
The order that works is collection, then evidence, then value. Establish who physically gets devices from people, in every market you hire in. Then decide what proof you need per device and choose a supplier who produces it. Only then compare rebates, because resale is a rounding difference next to the cost of a device that never came back.
Where collection has no owner today, a provider handling managed devices and recovery across countries solves the step that actually blocks everything downstream.
Our guides to IT asset disposal services and writing an asset disposal policy cover the adjacent decisions.
See how data wiping during offboarding is handled, or read our guide to IT asset recovery from remote staff.
Frequently asked questions
What should IT asset disposition companies give us as evidence?
A record per device rather than per batch: the serial number, the method used, the date, who performed it and the outcome. A certificate stating that a consignment was processed on a date tells a reviewer nothing about the one machine they are asking about, and that is always the machine that held something sensitive. Ask to see a sample report before signing anything.
Do certifications mean a supplier is good?
They mean a firm was audited against a standard at a point in time and has documented processes, which is a reasonable minimum bar rather than a decision. Two certified suppliers can return completely different evidence, one a line per serial number and the other a PDF naming a weight and a date. Use the EPA list of certified recyclers to filter, then choose on what you actually receive.
What happens to a drive that fails erasure verification?
It should be physically destroyed rather than redeployed or resold, and you should receive something recording that. Drives do fail verification, so the question is not whether it happens but whether the supplier has a defined route when it does. Firms who handle this regularly answer immediately and specifically, which makes it one of the fastest ways to sort a shortlist.
How much is resale worth on used laptops?
Enough to matter on volume and not enough to drive the decision. Value depends on age, condition and model, and suppliers differ in how they grade and what share they return. Ask for the grading scale and the revenue share in writing before signing, then treat it as a secondary factor. A better rebate is worth far less than evidence you can produce two years later.
Can disposition companies collect from employees’ homes?
Some can and many cannot, and it is the question most worth asking early. Specialist ITAD firms are generally built around pallets arriving at a facility rather than around dozens of individual home collections in different countries. Where that capability is missing, the contract still gets signed and the collection problem simply stays with your internal team, which is how devices never arrive.
Should we use one supplier globally or several regionally?
Several regionally is usually stronger on price and resale, and weaker on consistency of evidence, which is the thing that matters when somebody asks a question about one device. One supplier globally gives you a single evidence format and a single relationship, at a higher unit cost. Decide based on whether your constraint is budget or audit, because those point in opposite directions.
When should we involve a disposition supplier?
After you have solved collection, not before. The common order is to pick a disposition firm and then discover that getting machines from leavers across several countries was the hard part, so the certificate eventually covers only the devices that made it. Establish who physically collects devices in each market first, then choose on evidence, then compare rebates last.
