ITAD vs Recycling
One of these destroys the value in your hardware. The other pays you for it.
Both end with equipment leaving your building. What happens in between is completely different — and so is what you get back.
The short version
Recycling handles material. ITAD handles assets.
The words get used interchangeably, usually by people selling one of them. They are not the same service and they do not produce the same outcome.
Recycling
Your equipment becomes raw material
It is collected, shredded, and sorted into streams — steel, aluminum, copper, board. What you recover is scrap value, priced by weight.
Data is destroyed along with the device. That is genuinely destruction, but it usually happens in bulk, and what comes back is a weight ticket rather than a record of which drive was which.
ITAD — what we do
Your equipment stays equipment
Drives are sanitized and verified, or destroyed. Hardware is powered up, tested and graded. Anything with working life left is resold, and only what genuinely cannot be reused goes to a materials recycler.
What you recover is resale value, and what comes back is a signed certificate naming each serial number.
The gap is not small. A three-year-old server with resale demand behind it is worth hundreds of dollars to the next buyer and a few dollars as scrap metal. Shredding it is a decision to throw that difference away.
Side by side
What actually differs
| Recycling | ITAD with Jotan | |
|---|---|---|
| The equipment | Shredded and separated into material streams. | Tested, graded and resold when it still works. Recycled only when it doesn’t. |
| Your data | Destroyed with the device, typically in bulk. | Erased to NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 and verified, or physically destroyed — recorded either way. |
| What you get back on paper | Commonly a weight ticket for the load. | A signed certificate per serial number, naming the method, NIST level and verification result. Retrievable for seven years. |
| What you get back financially | Scrap value, and sometimes a bill for the pickup. | Resale value. When the hardware is worth something, we pay you and the sanitization is free. |
| Best suited to | Equipment that is dead, obsolete, damaged, or has no market. | Equipment with useful life left — servers, storage, networking, workstations. |
Swipe the table sideways to see every column.
Being straight about it
Sometimes recycling is the right answer
We are not going to pretend otherwise, because you will find out anyway.
A pallet of fifteen-year-old desktops, cracked chassis, dead power supplies, drives that fail sanitization, anything with no buyer on the other side — that is recycling, and nobody should pay asset-disposition prices for it. We send that material to a recycler ourselves, and we will tell you when your lot is mostly that.
The mistake is not choosing recycling. The mistake is choosing it for equipment that still had value, because someone quoted a simple flat price and nobody asked what was in the pile.
The question worth asking
One question separates real destruction from a weight ticket
Ask any vendor: which method did you use, on which drive, and what proved it worked?
If the answer is a tonnage figure, your data was handled as material. That may be perfectly fine for a truckload of dead desktops. It is not fine if someone later asks you to account for a specific serial number.
Our answer is a certificate per drive, naming the serial, the method, the NIST level achieved and the verification result — and we can still produce it in seven years.
A note on rules: disposal requirements vary by material and by state, and Minnesota restricts how certain electronics may be landfilled. We can tell you what we do with your equipment; for what the law requires of you, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is the authority, not us.
Where we fit
We resell first, which is why the wiping is real
Jotan Technology is a hardware broker. Servers, storage arrays and components are the business, and they have been for years.
That shapes everything on this page. We cannot resell a drive we cannot clear, so the sanitization has to actually work and has to be provable — that is our risk, not just your compliance box. And because the resale margin is where we make our money, we can afford to pay you for equipment that a disposal vendor would charge you to remove.
We work to NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 and can produce the evidence for any drive we have handled. We are not R2 or NAID AAA certified and we don’t claim to be. If your compliance program requires a certified vendor, say so up front and we will tell you plainly whether we are a fit.
Not sure which one your pile needs?
Send us the make, model, age and rough quantity. We will tell you what is worth reselling, what is only worth recycling, and what the net looks like either way.