Understanding The Real Impact of Your Decisions

It’s also the quality of those choices that makes the difference between positive and negative outcomes. For example, you could always go for the lowest priced electronics when deciding what to buy. You could focus on profits with your outdated electronics and auction them off to the highest bidder. If you are a retailer, you could liquidate returns to quickly move them out of your warehouse and write them off the books. And instead of testing, repairing, and reselling devices, you could just offload broken electronics to the nearest recycler. These are all short-sighted decisions that solve an immediate challenge. But what are the long-term effects of those choices on people, the planet, and lives around the world?

Yes, businesses should maximize the return value of returns and trade-ins, and they should minimize their costs of recycling.

Those are basic financial principles of any business. But in the end, it’s really about balance. So often those principles result in bad decisions by the managers that are responsible for the bottom line of returns, warranty programs, ITAD, EPR, and other related programs. Along with looking out for the bottom line, responsibility and sustainability are needed so that management decisions with our electronics do not risk the real revenue of the business or the equity of your brand that takes so long to build.

If you are looking for the lowest cost service or the lowest cost proposal, or are focused only on getting the best price for old and/or damaged electronics, then you probably are going to get the lowest level of service with the highest risks. Why should you care, once your electronics are out of your hands? Well, there are very real social and business costs that come with poor decision making.

Here is what low cost usually gets you in the reuse or recycling electronics business.

Low Cost Recyclers

• Pick out the good stuff that makes money
• Sell your old electronics for pennies instead of processing it
• Dump the bad stuff – or – sell it off to cheap exporters where it will end up in foreign facilities potentially without the tools or knowledge to safely recycle. Or worse yet, just get tossed into an electronics graveyard in some poor area of a remote country.

ITAD, Liquidators, Reverse Logistics vendors

• Every touch, test, and wipe costs money and erodes the value the refurbisher can get. High value items often go through the best processing because there is enough margin to cover it. Those items on the borderline between reuse and recycling are the ones to watch out for. They won’t be tested – instead, they will be sold by the sea container through liquidation auctions to overseas buyers. And after that, who knows what will happen to them next.
• Many will “Grade” the product by a visual inspection or the technical specs of the device. This isn’t testing. They may be selling junk, which is really just hazardous waste, a practice that is sometimes illegal.
• And will low-cost providers take the steps necessary to erase any residual data that may be left, even after your IT department does its best?

BER – Beyond Economic Repair

These are the electronics not worth testing or not worth fixing. They are batched into bulk sales and auctioned to the highest bidder, often for pennies on the dollar. If they don’t power on, how was your data wiped? Truth is, it wasn’t.

Maybe you’ll save a few bucks and rely on their warranty – They will tell you all about their E-Bay seller rating or that they must be doing it right because they have very little returns.

If you buy something really cheap, do you really take the time to return it if it does not work? No, you throw it in the trash. So how accurate is that return data if it isn’t even worth returning? Most of the time, there is a reason cheap electronics are cheap to buy.

This costs money, but to protect your business, your brand, your customers and employees, and the environment, doing it right is absolutely worth it. You should be prepared to pay for electronics that have a cost to safely recycle, like old CRT televisions or inkjet printers. And if you have enough good stuff, then you should see a net gain with equipment that can be tested, repaired, and remarketed for continued use. It doesn’t have to be an either/or choice between being financially, socially, and business responsible.

Electronics are a golden opportunity in every business to highlight your sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Every business relies on some type of electronics. It could be the cash registers or simply your phone. In many, it may not even require a change to your strategy. Recycling is a sustainable practice by its very nature. Social Responsibility might be where you need to make some changes, but these are realistic changes that can improve your bottom line and your image.

Every vendor you talk to will profess that they do it the right way, but how can you be sure?  The more you know, the more confident you can be that you are choosing the right partners.  SERI’s goal is to help organizations make better choices by providing better information. We recognize there are multiple channels with different challenges and requirements and explore each of these channels by looking at how to navigate to a sustainable outcome that will support your business, not put you at high risk.