Downsizing or Closing Your Facility? How to Handle IT, Batteries and Data

Office closures and consolidations usually run on a fixed date: the lease ends, the keys go back, and whatever is still in the building becomes a problem. Electronics are the part that causes the most trouble. Computers, servers, copiers and phones can still hold company and customer data, batteries cannot go in a dumpster, and a rushed cleanout tends to send the wrong things to the trash while paying several vendors to haul the rest.

Modern Waste Solutions has recycled electronics and destroyed data for California organizations since 1999 from its Sacramento facility. This guide covers an office closure's e-waste and data work in the order it has to happen: inventory, data, batteries, removal and records.

Start with a list, weeks before move-out if you can. Walk every room, closet and server rack and record what is leaving: desktops, laptops, monitors, servers, network gear, printers and copiers, phones, UPS units and loose batteries. Note which items are leased, because leased copiers and carrier equipment usually go back to the owner, and which ones sit under a legal hold or records requirement.

Then give each item a route:

Keep electronics apart from furniture and general debris from the first day; they follow different routes.

Closures are a common way for data to leave a building unnoticed. Drives get pulled and boxed, a copier goes out with the landlord's trash, or a laptop disappears into someone's car. Deleting files or reformatting a drive does not destroy the data on it.

Decide for each group of devices whether the data will be sanitized so the hardware can be reused, or whether the storage will be physically destroyed. Our secure data destruction service covers both, and on-site hard drive shredding lets your staff watch drives destroyed at your location before anything leaves. If the project also includes confidential paper records, add them to the same scope so one vendor accounts for all of it.

Until pickup day, keep data-bearing equipment in a locked room and hold the count steady.

California does not allow batteries in the trash, including ordinary alkaline cells. A closing office usually turns up drawers of loose batteries, laptop packs, UPS batteries in the server room, and sometimes emergency lighting or alarm batteries. Collect them in one labeled, non-conductive container, tape the terminals on loose lithium cells, and set aside anything swollen or damaged. Fluorescent lamps and ballasts from a build-out also need their own route. Battery recycling can be picked up in the same trip as the electronics.

A closure can easily involve a hauler, a shredding company, an e-waste recycler, a scrap buyer and extra labor, each with its own schedule and paperwork. Before you hire, ask each candidate:

• Can you collect electronics, batteries and data-bearing media in one pickup?
• Can you wipe or shred hard drives, and give us a record for each one?
• Can you do the loading and removal, including server racks?
• Will equipment with resale value be evaluated before it is recycled?
• What documents will we receive at the end, and when?

Retired IT with remaining value can offset part of the project cost through our IT asset disposition service. What cannot be reused goes to electronics recycling.

Once the office is empty, the paperwork is the only proof of what happened to the equipment. Keep the pickup ticket or chain-of-custody record, the certificate of recycling, and a certificate of data destruction that lists the drives or devices by serial number where you need that level of detail. Store them with the closure file; auditors, clients and insurers ask for them months later. Our guide to certificates of data destruction explains what a useful certificate contains.

How far ahead should we schedule an office cleanout?

Book it as soon as the move-out date is fixed. Sending the equipment list early lets us plan containers, labor and data destruction around your last day instead of squeezing everything into it.

Can we sell our old computers instead of recycling them?

Often, yes, if the equipment is recent and working. Wipe or remove the drives first and keep a record of how the data was handled.

A closure goes smoothly when the electronics, batteries and data are planned together and handled by one accountable team. Send us your equipment list and move-out date and request a quote, or call (916) 339-3676.

• U.S. EPA: Electronics Donation and Recycling: epa.gov/recycle/electronics-donation-and-recycling
• CalRecycle: Electronic Waste Management: calrecycle.ca.gov/electronics
• NIST SP 800-88, Guidelines for Media Sanitization: csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/88/r2/final