Decommissioning

How much of your existing furniture can be used in the new space?

Not just chairs and desks, but items such as whiteboards and boardroom tables are particularly apt for reuse.

Some factors may reduce the reusability of your items:

Re-Branding
A company-wide rebrand may mean your old furniture does not match the finishes and colours of your new brand.

Functional Space
What if your concept of a functional space changes? What if you move from private offices to a shared, open concept space? Different approaches will affect how much furniture you can reuse.

A variation on reuse is refurbishing your old furniture. Your old items can be given a new lease on life with creative refurbishing. Modular office partitions made from fabric, laminate or glass can be reskinned to make them appear like new workstations. Metal components can be recoated to update the finishes and style.

How many items can be repurposed?

Repurposing means either re-selling your items or donating them to a charitable organization.

Resale
There is an active re-sale market for furniture, workstations, filing cabinets, tables and other office equipment. As a decommissioning firm, we can often take the items for resale, either by themselves or through a partner organization.

Remember: Reselling can help you offset the decommissioning cost.
Donations
Charities, churches, synagogues, mosques and community centres will accept donated equipment. Their needs are constantly shifting, but we have a list of pre-approved charities that meet certain standards and certification criteria.

The next responsible option is recycling. Items not suitable for reuse or repurposing through sale or donation can often be recycled for their materials. This includes building materials – metal, cardboard and plastics – that come from your workspace.

What materials can you recycle? How much can you recycle? The types and amounts of items diverted for recycling vary based on the project type.

We strive to avoid sending things to landfill as much as possible. However, decommissioning projects still end up throwing away discarded wood or laminate furniture. The disposals add up. Each year, nearly 3 million tons of office furniture is thrown away at a disposal cost of more than $100 million.

Today, it is impossible to imagine the world without electronics. However, it is essential that your outdated electronic equipment is recycled responsibly to prevent environmental harm.

Your used IT equipment is also a significant part of the decommissioning. A responsible process considers:

• Responsible recycling through industry-leading programs
• Data security through secure data destruction services
• Disposal through IT asset disposal services

One of Track’s partner facilities de-manufactures almost 60 metric tons of e-waste every day.

Decommissioning your IT equipment follows a simple, straightforward and seamless process:

• Decommissioned IT equipment and e-waste is collected from customer locations and transported to a recycling centre.
• Once offloaded, the material is weighed and meticulously sorted into two categories: material to be tested and potentially reused, and material to be recycled.
• Material selected for potential reuse is directed to a technical area. Here devices containing data are moved into a data security area and undergo physical destruction and a digital erasure process certified by RCMP and the US Department of Defense.
• Equipment is inventoried, tested and sorted into categories before being forwarded to processing partners in the Ontario Electronic Stewardship program.

We focus on destroying your sensitive data responsibly and in accordance with federal regulations.