Parts resold responsibly. Data destroyed first, every time.
Every desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet we take in is physically disassembled. Storage is destroyed, boards are smelted in the United States for their metals, and only the parts that never held data reach our eBay store. We give up resale value on purpose.
Your data security outranks our resale value.
Most IT asset disposition vendors make their money reselling whole laptops and phones after a software wipe, because a working laptop is worth many times its parts. That is a business model built on hoping the wipe worked. We do not run it. Every computer, phone, and tablet that comes to us is taken apart, the storage is destroyed to NIST 800-88 or NSA/CSS 9-12, and we sell what is left as parts. We earn less per device. Your data is never on a device someone else owns.
Destruction does not mean waste. Everything that comes out of the shredder or the disintegrator is recycled, usually through smelting: metal fragments go to scrap, and the fine particles from boards and solid-state media go to a U.S. smelter for precious-metal recovery, the same place the whole boards go. We shred for security and recycle for the same reasons anyone does. Destroying data and being a green operation are not in tension; we do both, every job.
The line is not negotiable. We do not sell whole computers, phones, or tablets. We do not sell drives, wiped or otherwise. There is no such thing as a "certified wiped" laptop in our store, and there never will be.
Where every device goes
Three destinations, decided by one question: could this part ever have held your data?
Destroyed, then recycled
Hard drives, SSDs, M.2 cards, tapes, USB sticks, memory cards, and any board with storage soldered to it, which includes every phone and most thin laptops. Shredded or reduced to 2 mm particles under your certificate. The shredded output does not go to a landfill: aluminum, steel, and platter fragments are separated for scrap, and the particles from boards and SSDs go to the same domestic smelters as whole circuit boards, where the gold, silver, copper, and palladium are recovered.
Smelted in the United States
Motherboards, daughter cards, and other circuit boards that never held data are not worth reselling but are worth recovering. They go to a domestic smelter for gold, silver, copper, and palladium, through R2-certified partners, and we do everything we can to keep the material in the United States.
Resold as parts
Displays, keyboards, batteries, power supplies, fans and heat sinks, memory modules, processors, chassis, docks, and cables: parts with no persistent storage. Tested, photographed, and listed by Lisa McDevitt and her team.
How a part earns a listing
Security inspection
Every device is opened and every storage location identified: internal drives, M.2 and mSATA slots, soldered flash, SD and SIM slots, onboard memory in network gear, and the hard drives inside printers and copiers.
Disassembly
Computers, phones, and tablets are taken down to individual parts. Storage is destroyed on the spot. Boards with soldered storage are destroyed to 2 mm. Nothing is set aside to deal with later.
Sorting and documentation
Parts are sorted into resale, smelting, or recycling. The serial log ties the destroyed storage to your Certificate of Destruction, and no part goes to the store until that record exists.
Listing
Parts are tested, cleaned, photographed, and listed with their condition stated plainly. You will never see a whole computer, phone, or tablet in our store.
What you will find, and what you never will
In the store
- Monitors and laptop display assemblies
- Keyboards, mice, docking stations, webcams, and headsets
- Batteries, power supplies, chargers, and cables
- Memory modules, processors, fans, heat sinks, and bare chassis
- Rack hardware, mounts, and other equipment that never held data
Never
- Whole desktops, laptops, phones, or tablets, wiped or not
- Hard drives, SSDs, M.2 cards, tapes, USB sticks, and memory cards
- Motherboards and other circuit boards, which are smelted for their metals
- Network hardware that held configuration or credentials, unless it is wiped to NIST 800-88 Purge and verified
- Anything from a job whose agreement does not allow resale, which is recycled instead
Who runs it
Lisa McDevitt and her team run the eCommerce side of Mansfield Technologies. They receive parts only after the inspection and disassembly are complete and documented, test and photograph each one, and write the listings. If a listing is for a laptop display, it is because the laptop it came from no longer exists.
Questions
Why pay when free IT recycling exists?
Free recycling is not free; it is paid for with your hardware. A free pickup has to make its money somewhere, and it does that by reselling what you hand over, whole, online or overseas, as quickly and cheaply as possible. In that model the wipe, if there is one, is a cost, so it is the step under the most pressure to be rushed, skipped, or handed to whoever was available. Drives with intact customer data have been turning up in used markets for years for exactly this reason, and when one of them traces back to you, "we used a free recycler" is not a defense any regulator or auditor accepts.
When you pay us, you are paying technicians to disassemble your hardware, inspect every component that could hold data, and physically destroy those components in front of you, on your site, with a certificate that names each one. There is no resale incentive pulling against that work, because we do not resell whole devices at all.
This service is not for everyone. If your retired equipment never held anything sensitive, free recycling may be fine. If you are a hospital, a bank, a school district, a government office, a defense contractor, or anyone else whose data is regulated or classified, paying for documented destruction is the right decision, and it is the one NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 and NSA/CSS Policy Manual 9-12 point you toward.
Do you sell used laptops or phones?
No. Never whole. Every one is disassembled. The display, keyboard, and battery may be listed as parts; the drive is destroyed; the board is smelted.
Do you sell used hard drives?
No. Not wiped, not certified, not at all. Storage is destroyed, and the certificate says so.
Why not just wipe and resell? Everyone else does.
Because a wipe is a promise that software did its job on every sector of every drive, and we have seen what turns up when it did not. Disassembly and destruction remove the question. It costs us resale value, and we made that trade deliberately.
What about wiping? Isn't that good enough?
"Wiping" is not a technical term, and that is the problem. NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 defines three sanitization methods with different levels of assurance: Clear, which protects against recovery with ordinary tools; Purge, which protects against laboratory recovery; and Destroy. Which Purge technique actually works depends on the media. A SATA hard drive, a SATA SSD, an NVMe drive, and a phone each need a different command, and some drives do not implement the command correctly, or at all. NIST 800-88 Rev. 2 no longer lists those techniques itself; it points organizations to IEEE 2883, the Standard for Sanitizing Storage, for media-specific guidance.
So if your policy says "wipe," someone has to read IEEE 2883, match each drive model to the right technique, run it, verify it, and document it, on every drive, every time. Destruction meets the highest assurance level in the standard and removes most of the places human error can hide: no command chosen for the wrong media, no drive that silently ignored it, no hidden areas or spare blocks left untouched, no verification skipped at the end of a long day. That is why we destroy rather than wipe, even when wiping would let us resell the device.
Where do the circuit boards go?
To a smelter in the United States that recovers gold, silver, copper, and palladium, through R2-certified partners. Boards with soldered storage are destroyed to 2 mm first. We cannot promise that no gram of material ever crosses a border downstream, and we will not pretend to; we can promise R2-certified handling at every step and every effort to minimize exports.
Isn't shredding wasteful?
No. What comes out of the shredder is still recyclable, and it is recycled. Drive housings, platters, and steel are separated for scrap; the particles from boards and SSDs go to the same domestic smelter as whole circuit boards, where the precious metals are recovered. Physical destruction changes the shape of the material, not where it ends up. We are a green operation that also happens to be a secure one.
Could parts from my organization's equipment end up in the store?
Only parts with no data risk, and only if your agreement allows resale. If it does not, everything is recycled through our R2-certified partners. Either way, the storage was destroyed under your certificate first, and you can opt out of resale entirely at quote time.