Retirement of Specialty Equipment

This equipment is all commercial grade. These aren’t the electronics you can buy at the local store. They are highly specialized for their purpose, which makes them expensive and limited in availability. The challenge with this equipment is that it takes highly sophisticated and expensive equipment to test the functionality. This makes the typical strategy of testing everything before reselling it very difficult to implement. So we need to think outside the box to extend the life of this equipment in our circular lifecycle model.

is highly specialized and used in production for decades. Upgrades are extremely expensive and often not necessary. What is necessary is the ability to repair installed equipment. The challenge is that parts for used telecom equipment can be hard to find. So a whole market for used telecom components has emerged to fill this void and to keep our voice and data networks operating.

But there is a difference between a company deinstalling working equipment and harvesting the working parts that can be used in installations of the same equipment elsewhere. This is a planned process protective of reuse value. Conversely, some telecom equipment is simply removed and sent to a recycler. From there, it is recognized to have potential value and marketed online for potential buyers. We don’t know if it was working when deinstalled and the handling of this equipment may not have protected it from damage. And because it is specialty equipment, most facilities won’t have the sophisticated and expensive equipment to test the components.

Could we reduce waste and additional manufacturing, which is more harmful to the environment by simply fixing the broken returns?

Reuse of Telecom equipment is not possible without quality controls from the time Telecom equipment is deinstalled from the working environment. Here are some recommendations:

is another sub-sector of specialty equipment. This equipment has an important reuse value to the health and well-being of humans. When hospitals upgrade to newer equipment, that does not mean that the old medical devices are not useful. Reusing these devices in low-income areas can improve the quality of healthcare and enrich lives with affordable medical equipment. But safety should be the top concern with used medical equipment. This is at least a two-step process.

First, it must be determined if the used medical equipment is functional. A defibrillator is not very useful if the battery no longer holds a charge.

Second, the equipment needs to be calibrated and verified by a professional biomedical technician to be patient ready. The challenge is that medical equipment often requires specialized test equipment and expertise to achieve this.

Like telecom and medical equipment, scientific equipment is highly specialized in its purpose and functionality. It cannot easily be tested by the usual recyclers or refurbishers so it requires sophisticated tools and technology to truly verify if it is functional.

Likewise, just powering up does not mean the device is functional. Scientific equipment is relied upon to make accurate measurements. Sophsiticated calibration and verification of results is needed.