ITAD, explained by someone who sells none of it
Nearly every explanation of ITAD you will read today was written by a company that sells it. That is not a scandal, it is simply who bothers to write. It does mean the one question you actually have, how do I check this vendor, is the one nobody answers.
What the acronym covers
IT asset disposition: the set of decisions and records that govern what happens to a piece of IT equipment after it stops being useful to you: what is on it, who takes it, what is done to the data, and where the hardware ends up.
The word covers a process, not a service tier. A three-laptop refresh and a hall of four hundred racks are both ITAD. What changes with scale is not the steps but how much of the record you can reconstruct afterwards if nobody wrote it down at the time.
Why this page can say things the others cannot
We move no equipment, erase no drive and sign no certificate. It costs us nothing to tell you that a certificate can be suspended without anyone telling you, or that the facility named on it may not be the facility your pallets reach. A vendor writing the same sentences would be arguing against their own paperwork.
The three certifications, and what each one actually covers
They are quoted together on vendor pages as though they were interchangeable badges. They are not. Each was checked against the issuing body on 16 septembre 2026.
R2v3
SERI (Sustaining Electronics Recycling International)
Responsible recycling and reuse of electronics, including requirements on data security.
1,252 certified facilities across 44 countries
The certificate belongs to a FACILITY, not to a company. SERI's own directory counts facilities, not firms, and lets you search each one's scope.
e-Stewards
Basel Action Network
Responsible recycling with an emphasis on where the material physically ends up.
Accredited by ANAB, a member of the International Accreditation Forum
It is the only one of the three that verifies destinations physically: the program runs unannounced inspections and uses random GPS tracking to confirm equipment reaches only pre-approved destinations.
NAID AAA
i-SIGMA
Secure destruction of information, including on electronic media.
Scope varies by service and by location
It certifies the destruction operation, not the recycling chain. A vendor can hold it and still have no answer about where the chassis went afterwards.
A certificate is a status, not a property
This is the part that surprises people. An R2 certificate is not a thing a company owns permanently. It is a row in a public database, and that row can change without anybody sending you a note. These are the states it can be in:
- Active
- Suspended
- Revoked
- Expired
- Voluntarily Withdrawn
- Facility Closed
- Facility Moved
SERI publishes the changes from the last seven days on its directory: newly activated, recently inactive, no longer certified. The PDF a vendor emails you proves a certificate existed on the day it was scanned. The directory tells you what it says this morning.
Five checks, in the order they are worth doing
1. Find the certificate in the issuer's directory, not in the vendor's PDF
SERI publishes every R2 facility and its status. A PDF sent by email proves that a certificate existed on the day it was scanned. The directory tells you what it says today.
2. Read the address on the certificate against the address your pallets will go to
This is the single most common gap, and it is not usually deception. A firm with one certified facility and three collection depots is describing itself accurately when it says it is certified. Your drives still spent two nights in an uncertified building.
3. Read the scope, not just the logo
A facility is certified for specific processes. The directory lets you search scope text. A facility scoped for recycling is not thereby scoped for data sanitization.
4. Ask what happens downstream, and ask for it in writing
Most vendors send material onward to at least one other processor. The question is not whether they do, it is whether they can name who, and whether that party is certified too.
5. Ask who holds the certificate during the hours your equipment is in transit
Collection, storage and transport are where the chain of custody actually breaks. The processing facility can be impeccable and the gap can still exist upstream of it.
Why so much of this is offered free, and what that changes
Why so much of this is offered free
The resale value of your working equipment funds the labour and leaves the vendor a margin. That is a legitimate model and often the cheapest one for you. It has one consequence worth understanding: the party deciding whether a device is worth reselling is the party that keeps the proceeds.
Where that creates a tension
Physical destruction removes resale value. Erasure preserves it. Both are defensible outcomes under NIST 800-88, and the choice belongs to your data classification, not to the vendor's inventory. A vendor who proposes a method before asking what was on the drive has decided in the wrong order.
What a revenue-share line actually means
A quote showing a share of resale proceeds is a quote whose final figure you cannot check unless the settlement is itemised per asset. Ask for the settlement format before signing, not after the truck leaves.
What you should be holding when it is over
The service is forgotten within a month. The record is what you are still relying on when a regulator, an acquirer or your own auditor asks where a specific serial number went.
- One line per serial number, not one certificate per pallet.
- The sanitization method applied to each device, and the date.
- The destination of each asset: resold, recycled, destroyed.
- The name of every party that held the equipment between your floor and its end state.
- A document that still means something in two years, when the person who signed it has left.
What that record must contain line by line is on the certificate of destruction, the standard behind the methods is on NIST 800-88, and how the resale side works is on resale and recycling. If what you are retiring is a room rather than a rack, start instead with decommissioning.