Replacement was first driven by the needs of the applications themselves, later it was driven by the needs of newer applications and more recently it has been driven by the needs of the operating systems. Today's Windows XP alone requires several more magnitudes of memory and storage than was even available for many main frames at the time of the initial Personal Computer.

However I see a change on the horizon as now the expanding of technology no longer drives the purchase of new equipment in the office areas. Typical office applications like word processing, spreadsheets, accounting and customer contract tracking no longer receive much bounce from adding new and faster hardware. Of course scientific applications which require massive computations will always benefit from newer and faster hardware. And the home PCs are driven by entertainment desires for music and videos.

But businesses require that there be some quantitative reason to replace hardware, and so I expect that the replacement cycle for office equipment will slow unless it is driven by new security needs and solutions or some other "killer application" which is as yet unrevealed.

As for the actual recycling of computers, it is often done in stages. To understand we should follow the life cycle of a typical business office PC. When purchased it will be top of the line for all the most basic features, but may not possess all the features of a home machine. It will have a full complement of memory and storage and probably a larger more useful screen.

A few years ago 14" screens were considered large; but today business seldom buys smaller than 17" monitors. The reason is not because they want employees to have larger pictures for viewing movies, it is because the average employee will be more productive if they can have more open windows on the desktop & can view more windows at the same time. Similarly the utilization is driving the purchase of LCD small footprint monitors. LCD monitors costs over a thousand dollars only a few years ago and now they are down to the perceived value of standard monitors. The price of standard monitors, of course, has been driven down even further.

Corporate buyers usually lease computers so they don't have to deal with the problems of what to do with the old systems. This way, they can also keep their company using the latest equipment and not have to deal with the problems of obsolescence either. Lease are usually set for 2 or 3 years and the computer systems are returned to the lessors at the end of the original lease.

At this point in the life of a corporate computer, it will be shipped back to the lessor and placed in a warehouse while the lessor prepares to dispose of it. There is still significant value to the 2 or 3 year old system, so it will likely be resold on the used computer market. Some companies allow employees to buy the machines coming off lease so they don't have to pay shipping back to the lessor, who would actually prefer the cash to the headache of finding a new home for it.

This is probably the proper place to point out that when computers are pulled out of service, the contents of the hard drives are copied to the new systems which have all the newest versions of software loaded into them. Sometimes conversions are necessary for databases which have been changed. If done properly, after the data is transferred and verified on the new system, the old hard drive will be erased. There are many horror stories where drives are not erased and sensitive data has gotten out into the public domain. That was much more common a few years ago - the horror stories have caused most companies to be much more careful now and it is not repeated very often. In fact, after the company has deleted their files and returned the system to the lessor, the lessor will usually wipe out the entire disk, including the operating system, before sending it on it's way.

The mature lessor who has been in business long enough to be receiving machines back from lease will have so many coming back in that they can't just resell them with adds in the local newspaper. So they will try to sell them wholesale, through auction sites (eBay has changed way a lot of business is done) or directly to wholesalers who pay immediate cash for bulk quantities of systems. Some of these wholesalers will resale through auction sites, but most of them resell through the expanding number of used computer system retailers across the country. Still others will find their way to foreign countries. Most countries receiving sued equipment from the US are in Central and South America.

The former corporate system will then find a new home in a home or small business that finds that 3 year old systems work just fine for the applications found in second tier businesses.

After being used in the secondary market for a few years to perhaps many years, the system will finally be ready for the final journey and be sent to a computer recycler. The recycler often will sort the equipment they receive into working and non-working and offer the working equipment to the low-income community at drastically reduced prices. A working system at this point may be sold for $100 or less from a store located in the poorer neighborhoods.

Non working and obsolete equipment will be broken down and the plastic ground into small granules which are used in a variety of setting. Right now there is a large Interstate upgrade program going on in Peoria and much of the ground plastic is finding its way into our new roadway.

Metals are extracted and resold to a metal recycler who melts it down and separates it according to metal and then resells the pure metal for reuse in computers, appliances, instruments or other use. Eventually all the systems make it to this final resting place - some more quickly than others.

I suppose this is much more than you needed to know, but I hope it help you understand what computer recycling is about today.

-Murrel Rhodes