Blog
Opinions about grading, logistics, lease returns, compliance, and why your ERP thinks a pallet is a product. Written by people who've had these arguments in actual warehouses.
Three people, three mental images, zero alignment.
You say "Grade B." Your buyer pictures minor scuffs. Your warehouse pictures a cracked bezel and a missing key cap. The leasing company pictures something that needs €120 in repairs. Everyone heard the same two words. Nobody saw the same laptop.
Read more
A eulogy for the CSV that ruined your deal.
You export it. You format it. You email it to 40 brokers. By Thursday, three items are sold, two have been regraded, and one has a cracked screen nobody noticed. By Friday, someone makes an offer on a ghost. The CSV isn't the problem. The workflow that requires one is.
Read more
A Proustian meditation on warehouse tracking and the human condition.
You need that pallet. The one with the mixed-grade EliteBooks. It was in Zone B this morning. Or was it Zone C? Dave knows, but Dave is at lunch. Dave is always at lunch when topology becomes existential.
Read more
Your auditor can count. Can your system?
A modern Dell Latitude has two NVMe drives. That's two erasure certificates per device. Your system says "laptop wiped." The ADISA auditor says "show me both certificates." You can show one. The other 340? An uncomfortable silence.
Read more
The SLA said ten. Reality had other plans.
340 laptops from a bank via a leasing company. The manifest said Dell Latitude 5430. The first box contained ThinkPad T14s. The chargeback was calculated in Excel. The settlement was disputed because nobody could agree on what "cosmetic damage" meant. A play-by-play of everything that went wrong.
Read more
How much you're paying to keep a system alive that one person understands.
It was built in 2014 by a contractor named Raymond. Raymond left. The documentation is a Post-it note and a prayer. Every change request costs €30K. Every new field takes three weeks. But it works. Sort of. In the way that navigating by the stars works.
Read more
And three consulting sessions won't fix that.
You paid €80K for an ERP implementation. The consultant promised the warehouse module would handle ITAD. Six months later, a pallet of mixed-grade HP EliteBooks with three different keyboard layouts is registered as a single "product" with a quantity of 1. The ERP isn't broken. It was built for a different universe.
Read more
How an industry that handles sensitive data runs on a messaging app.
Forty-seven replies. Two are relevant. One is a GIF. The ITAD secondary market moves billions of euros per year, and a disturbing amount of it is negotiated between a thumbs-up emoji and a voice note recorded while driving on the A10.
Read more
A story about fixed pricing on a moving market.
You priced that 500-unit lot at €150 per unit because that's what it sold for last time. "Last time" was six months ago. The market shifted. You got one offer. You took it. Three other buyers would have paid €195. That's €22,500 in margin that evaporated because your pricing strategy was a memory.
Read more
A field guide to the trust problem nobody wants to discuss.
You wired €45,000 to a company you've traded with twice. The goods arrived. Half didn't match the description. Getting your money back took four months and a lawyer who bills by the hour. At some point, you started wondering who was more expensive — the lawyer or the bad deal.
Read more
An obituary for a file format that never deserved this much power.
It started as a helpful spreadsheet. Then it became the backbone of a billion-euro secondary market. It gets emailed, forwarded, printed, highlighted, ignored, updated (sometimes), and eventually replaced by the next one. The stock list isn't a tool. It's a coping mechanism.
Read more
The 45-minute phone call that shouldn't be necessary.
Every deal starts with the same ritual: the buyer calls, asks about condition, gets told "Grade B," and then spends 45 minutes asking what that actually means. This isn't a communication problem. It's a standardisation problem wearing a communication problem's hat.
Read more
How R2 audit prep goes from "three people, two weeks" to "pull the report."
It's 8am on a Monday. The R2 auditor is in the lobby. Your compliance manager is in the parking lot, speed-walking. The certificates are in four different systems. The chain of custody lives partly in software, partly in someone's head, and partly in a folder that says "DO NOT DELETE (old)."
Read more
The Dell from the bank. The HP from the hospital. The ThinkPad from the law firm.
That laptop sitting in receiving? It might contain financial records, patient data, or legal correspondence that would make a privacy lawyer weep. Every device that enters your warehouse is a ticking clock. The question isn't whether it contains sensitive data. The question is how sensitive.
Read more
The 2025 revision, explained for people who'd rather test hardware than read standards.
Clear, Purge, and Destroy are still the three categories. But the expanded guidance for modern storage media, the stricter verification requirements, and the emphasis on per-device documentation mean your current process might have a few gaps. Let's find them before your auditor does.
Read more
How e-waste regulation is quietly reshaping ITAD logistics across Europe.
You used to ship that pallet of end-of-life servers from Brussels to your processing partner in Poland without a second thought. Then the Basel Amendments happened. Now you need prior informed consent, accurate classification, and a paper trail that would impress a forensic accountant. Welcome to 2026.
Read more
Your inbox has three PE inquiries this week. That's not a coincidence.
The ITAD industry is having its MSP moment. Private equity firms are circling, looking for platforms to consolidate. The companies that can prove recurring revenue, standardised processes, and scalable operations are getting acquired. The ones that can't are getting competed out. Which one are you?
Read more
How refurbishment went from conference buzzword to actual business model.
Everyone puts "circular economy" on their trade show booth. Fewer people can explain what it means for their Tuesday afternoon. Refurbishment used to be the thing you did when the device was too good to shred and too bad to sell at full price. Now it's a €36 billion market with its own supply chains, standards, and acronyms.
Read more
Remote work didn't just change where people work. It broke your retrieval process.
The old model: employees return devices to IT, IT puts them on a pallet, you pick up the pallet. The new model: 200 employees in 200 homes, 6 countries, and a logistics challenge that makes your warehouse look simple. The ITAD process starts with getting the device back. And that's the hard part now.
Read more
A sober look at what AI actually does in ITAD. It's less exciting and more useful than you think.
No, a language model cannot tell you if that ThinkPad has a scratched palmrest. But it can tell you that your testing queue has a 3-day bottleneck on Tuesdays, that your Grade C devices are being underpriced by 15%, and that your lease return processing time is 40% longer than it needs to be.
Read more
What happens when both sides can see the same numbers.
The lease return is done. 340 laptops tested, graded, wiped. The chargeback rules from the contract say €400 per missing device. The system counted the missing devices. The settlement calculated itself. The client reviewed it. Nobody argued. Not because they agreed to be nice, but because there was nothing to argue about.
Read more
Residual value, chargebacks, and the €50K gap between "fair market" and "fixed purchase."
The lease says "fair market value." You picture €280 per laptop. The lessor pictures €180. The difference, multiplied by 400 devices, is €40,000. And that's before the chargebacks for the 12 units with cracked screens that your team graded as "minor cosmetic." Words are expensive when they're not defined.
Read more
How four competing bidders tell you more than your spreadsheet ever will.
You've been pricing lots the same way for ten years: check what similar stuff sold for last time, adjust for condition, add a margin, hope for the best. It works. Until the market moves and you're the last person to know. Auctions aren't just a sales channel. They're a pricing oracle.
Read more
Lost efficiency isn't dramatic. It's a slow bleed of hours, errors, and missed revenue.
Nobody walks into a warehouse and loses €180,000 in one dramatic moment. It happens in five-minute increments: re-keying serial numbers, searching for pallets, reconstructing agreements from email threads, waiting for systems to sync, explaining grading over the phone. Add it up. Then sit down.
Read more
Why multi-tenant isolation must happen at the database, not the application.
Your competitor also uses the same platform. Can they see your inventory? Your pricing? Your client list? If the answer depends on the application layer "just working correctly," you have an architecture problem dressed up as a feature.
Read more
And hopes nothing changed in those 59 minutes.
Sync jobs are the duct tape of enterprise software. They connect systems that were never meant to talk to each other, on a schedule that was chosen because someone said "hourly seems fine." Then an asset gets sold at minute 12, re-sold at minute 47, and the sync at minute 60 has a nervous breakdown.
Read more
Barcode in. Asset out. Certificate attached. That's it.
You don't need 200 endpoints. You need three things: scan a barcode and get the asset, update the asset and get confirmation, generate a certificate and get a PDF. Everything else is a conversation between your systems that doesn't need to involve a human.
Read more
The story of the first line of code and why nobody said "let's wait until January."
December 25th, 2025. Someone ran npx create-next-app while the rest of the family was arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. The first hero section was written, rewritten the next morning, and rewritten again the day after. Some things in software never change. Starting is one of them.
Read more
Why ITAD is only now getting tools that were actually built for it.
Every other industry got its own software decades ago. Healthcare got Epic. Construction got Procore. Even dog groomers have dedicated scheduling apps. ITAD? "Just use the warehouse module in your ERP." Or: "Have you tried a custom Access database?" The industry that handles billions in assets was told to make do. Until now.
Read more
A dispatch from the bar at the ITAD conference.
It's 9pm. The sessions are over. Everyone is at the hotel bar, and the conversation is the same as last year: the tools are terrible, the processes are manual, the grading is inconsistent, the stock lists are unreliable. Everyone nods. Everyone agrees. Everyone goes home and opens the same spreadsheet on Monday morning.
Read more
Founding members get every post first. Plus 12 months free. Plus bragging rights.
Get Early Access