For two weeks, my section at work has organized and is currently running an “electronics recycling and disposal event”. Our team has done roughly a dozen of these events this year across the country, but this is the first one we’ve done here in Oklahoma City. It’s also the first one I’ve directly been involved with one and, holy cow. It’s hard work.

It can be challenging to dispose of government inventory. It’s a bit complicated, but we can’t just throw outdated equipment away. All equipment is barcoded and not all items are disposed of in the same way. There’s also a lot of paperwork involved, and sometimes it’s easier to just stick old or broken items in a closet rather than do through the process. Our event is kind of a “forgiveness/reset” event. Our team has placed large Gaylord boxes (48″ x 40″ x 36″) all around our campus and invited organizations and even individuals to place old equipment into these boxes. This can be anything from computers and laptops to cables, docking stations, software… you name it. These boxes are being collected and transported to a central location where they have to be sorted depending on the type of equipment.

I have been floating between multiple locations this week which has given me a unique perspective on the project. On our campus, a steady stream of boxes are being delivered and picked up. There are a lot of buildings and only so many movers, so this has taken a lot of planning and scheduling — and, when things change, replanning and rescheduling. At that point in the process, nothing is sorted; that happens over at our offsite depot a few miles away. I was hoping by 2024 we would have robots or something to do this part, but no. A group of hard working people pull everything out of those boxes and resort them into different boxes. Every single item has to be touched.

There’s no way to fully convey the scope of this effort, but I’ll try. On Wednesday we had 40 of those gigantic boxes arrive for processing. Forty boxes in one day. Again, the boxes contain electronic stew. One by one, they are emptied. Computers go in one pile, monitors go in another pile, laptops go in another pile, and so on. We are getting tons (literally) of what we call “peripherals” which includes cables, speakers, keyboards, mice, and lots of random items. I hate seeing brand new items come through the process, but I also hate seeing the really old stuff go through. Yesterday we found a cassette player from the 70s. While I was out, someone said four Apple II computers arrived in a box. What four Apple II computers were doing on our campus is, like a lot of these things, a mystery.

Four days into the event, we have processed more than 40,000 pounds of excess equipment. As a lifelong packrat, it breaks my soul to see all of these things go through the system. I have seen boxes and boxes of brand new keyboards come in; the keyboards have to be removed from their boxes to be tossed into bins. While the keyboards are a few years old, they’re the exact same model that’s on my desk. Nothing that’s barcoded can be saved from the process. It’s all government property and will continue on its way to be resold or recycled. Occasionally we’ll find something like an old Walkman or radio that isn’t barcoded meaning it was probably someone’s personal property and those items may or may not end up in a pile near me, but at the end of the day it all has to go back.

One of the things I’ve been tasked with is taking pictures of the event… which is ironic that I cannot share them since they are taken on government facility. The picture at the top of this post is a stock photo, but multiply it by about a hundred and you’ll get a rough idea what we’re dealing with.

There may not be enough Advil and back pills to get me through this project, but we’ll see. It has been a fun and eye opening change of pace.