this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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I work for a small IT company. PCs that are discarded by our customers are securely erased and removed from our documentation before they are sent away for disposal.
We don't track how many PCs actually make it to disposal and we already have more than enough in the workshop for testing and emergencies.
So I sometimes take one for my homelab or to donate it to a non-profit I'm involved with. All it does to the company is save them money on disposal.
My brother in law is in a similar role and we often barter for PCs/parts. I'll work on his car for him and he'll give me an Optiplex micro or a GPU for the trouble. It's great
Same for me.. After getting a new laptop we were supposed do deliver the old one to a recycling centre.
My first work laptop from that job served as my home server up until last month or so (about 8 years). My second laptop I kept after quitting the job. I was also supposed to deliver it to a recycling point. I quit that job about 4-5 years ago. I'm writing this reply from that 2nd laptop right now :)
Seems like a better use of resources than having it scrapped. I don't really consider it stealing, but I do get it's probably not 100% legal either.
Both laptops are Lenovo's.
I was given a pair of HP ProLiant G6 rack servers for free from an IT director I had connections with when he was doing a routine hardware upgrade. Probably saved him some bucks on e-waste disposal costs. I kept one for myself and I gave the other to a like-minded friend.
I had no experience with homelabbing at the time. Was hoping this would be my foot in the door. Unfortunately that was the day I learned that enterprise rack servers from the pre-2010s sound like vacuum cleaners when they run. (They probably still do, I imagine, just maybe to a slightly lesser extent. I'm told enterprise hardware these days isn't so much pursuing incremental leaps in speed and power as much as it is pursuing energy efficiency and noise.) Because of all that noise, I ended up not using it, as I have nowhere I can stick it so it can scream and not bother anyone. Ah well. It was a fun experiment nonetheless and cost me nothing.
I set it up in a LACK rack, which I still have. These days it's just a slightly ugly, deceptively heavy coffee table in my living room. Might as well just toss it out at this point.