What to do with broken office equipment?
At some point all office equipment breaks and needs to be replaced. The question then becomes what do you do with the broken equipment. This is not as simple as it sounds, in most cases it will need to be recycled. If you have a lot of equipment hauling it to the recycling place can be surprisingly expensive.
The most important thing to keep in mind if you have broken office equipment is that you cannot simply throw it out. In most areas you are not allowed to throw away electronics because of some of the components that are in them. Even if you live in an area where you are allowed to throw them out this is not really something that you are going to want to do. It is not very responsible environmentally and it may even cost you money to do so.
If the equipment that is broken is still on warranty you are probably going to want to send it back to the manufacturer. If the warranty has expired however the best option is to recycle the item. In most cases this is simply a matter of taking it to your local recycling center and leaving it there. This is perfectly workable if you have just one item to recycle but it becomes a much bigger problem if you have an office full of equipment that needs to be recycled. In this case your best option is to get a bin from a trash hauling company and fill it up; you can then have the bin taken to the recycling center.
One thing to keep in mind before you start taking your old electronics to the recycling place is that many of them still have value. In most cases this will be for the parts that can be reused like printer cartridges. There is also a small amount of gold in most electronic devices as well as significantly more copper. There are companies whose business is to strip these metals out and resell them. The amount that you would get from one computer is very small but if you have enough of them it may be worth contacting one of these companies.
Since there is value in most broken office equipment there are people you can call who will haul it away for free if you have a lot to dispose of. These are companies who will then sell off the parts that still have value. You can do this yourself if you want in order to get the money but most businesses decide that the time involved is not really worth the money that they make by stripping their electronics apart. However having somebody to haul them away for you free of charge can really save you a lot of money on disposal.