I’m a big believer in fair treatment and not discriminating against people and organizations, and that includes businesses not being able to get vital, professional services because of their size or revenue.
In the 3 years that I’ve been working with NextUse, one of my roles has been structuring and executing IT Asset Disposition services for clients, from local small & mid-size businesses to global enterprises, either directly in the New England area, or through a highly certified and vetted partner network elsewhere.
I helped build out a pricing structure for services based on NextUse’s costs, and I structured the pricing-per-unit of end-of-life IT device so that pricing would scale with volume. Smaller companies with fewer devices have as much access to NextUse’s best-in-industry services as huge companies with massive numbers of devices.
We never set a minimum cost to take a job, although I found ITAD vendors with much worse certifications with up to $10,000 USD minimums to even quote a job.
This year, with all the stress and costs impacting people and businesses of all sizes, in the face of growing physical evidence of climate change, we decided to aggressively tackle e-waste at the local level, starting in the area around the NextUse facility in Dover, NH and expanding outward.
We brainstormed how to collect assets from organizations in local communities, to ensure that the data on them does not end up on the Dark Web and that the hazardous materials inside them do not end up in landfills. We keep the cost down as much as possible and are doing some of the work pro bono for those with no budget for these essential services.
We’re also eating the cost of getting the word out and administering these additional projects.
Frequently these days people consider where they can help limit the damage to the environment or give back to the community, and there are plenty of initiatives such as planting trees to offset carbon footprints. But New Hampshire where NextUse is headquartered is the 2nd most heavily forested state in the United States, at 78.4%, with Maine to our East being the most heavily forested at 89%, so we had to come up with another solution to contribute.
When people from the surrounding area contact us from their owner-operated, everyday businesses, I work with them to find what they have, what they need done, and how we can keep the job under their budget.
When I’m at the Dover facility I meet people from the local community when they come to drop off assets, or when we go to their home office or garage where they’ve been accumulating devices such as cell phones, laptops, PCs, and even printers, some that they can’t safely move themselves to bring to us.
And they may not care that NextUse is one of the 6 best-certified ITAD vendors in the world for data security of digital device retirement, but they appreciate that we help all comers.
