Slashdot Mirror
Changing a School's Tech Disposal Policy?
An anonymous reader writes "I attend a state university where a new building has recently been put in, and a new budget put in place. They have decided to upgrade all the computer systems involved in the department, with a few slight exceptions. From my limited understanding, State policy is that we cannot just let things go, they have to be sent back to the state capital in order to take them off the books. Then they put them in the dumpster. I feel that this is a huge waste of useful machines (some are merely two years old), but I know not how to change this. Any suggestions, or does anyone know where Illinois dumps used tech?"
after the equipment is taken off the books, it's sold to the brother-in-law of some administrator for $0.50/ton. He then cleans up the PCs and sells them to government schools (via a contract he has with the superintendent, who happens to be his nephew) for 150% of what their new value was.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Have you looked at GovDeals at all? I work for a state agency in Missouri, and all of our equipment ends up being sold to the public through that site. I also notice that Illinois has a good deal of equipment there also.
I don't know much about Texas or Illinois (limited understanding of geography?). But, in at least one branch of the Fed, they're sent back to a central office and taken off the books. Then, they sit in large metal containers and wait until they're approved for excess so that they can be put out for auction. Then, they're forgotten about and left to age until they can't be sold. Finally, they're sent out for recycling or landfill.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
...which is a large Big 12 school, the biology, chemistry, and physics departments generally find it easier to just put the computers out in the hallways and wait for them to disappear. I've gotten all kinds of weird old hardware from them. There are also disgruntled IT staffers that have been here a while that will happily provide hardware to friendly fellow geeks instead of sending them to the dumpster. Those folks have gotten me AUI transceivers, a few SGI workstations, and a huge box of SGI software, including several releases of IRIX 6.5. Some of the other departments will pull a computer out of retirement to serve a specifc purpose. Since I work at a spinoff of the university, I asked nicely and got a P4/Celeron box to use as a server for a joint project, and a fully equipped, mint condition, never used Sun Blade 2000 for my desk...er...for another server. :)
I'm patiently waiting for the university to retire/throw out its 8-node Origin 2000.
At a non profit I used to work at we did something similar. Profitable devisions upgrade their pentiums, I'd take those to the "treading water" folks to replace their 486's, then I take those 486's to the dregs running 386's. Then one day the profitable decision decided they needed to get "credit" for their dregs. I wasn't around to see how that worked out, I jumped to a "Dot Com" around then...
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I live in Springfield (Yes, an alderman here is Gail Simpson and our state is indeed run by cartoons), where the state's computer systems get "dumped". They are disposed of the same as state-owned automobiles: by auction. Once or twice a year they sell used computers at the fairgrounds by the palletload.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Usually the biggest pain is the stupid paperwork needed by the state to remove computers from inventory systems. They ought to just expire all computers from inventory after 5 years (or whatever), automatically.
Having worked at virginia tech's computer science department in the past for a few years, I can tell you that what you're saying is logical, but impossible in the current government system.
The inventory people basically accept goods in, give them to you, and expect to get them back. In our situation, after that happens, they auction them off (VT auctions are like every other month, in an old warehouse looking building). The paperwork is intense. But the long and short of it is that the department cannot do anything with the computers.
Problem two is that the inventory system at Tech doesn't account for depreciation. At all.
Case in point: We had a professor create what he called a "pedoplex", which was this huge gazebo (shoot arrows into it?) looking thing that was just banks and banks of hard drives. In 199X or whatever, it cost $1.5 MILLION DOLLARS pinky to lips. Now? We'd be hard pressed to sell it for scrap metal - and I'm not kidding. Well, anyway, the guy that was the contractor that built it for the professor after a while realized that the prof wasn't using it anymore, and was like "this thing is neat, I built it and I'm proud of my work". The professor basically gave it to the guy. He moved to Pennsylvania.
SO... every year, during inventory, someone would have to go UP to PA and walk into a storage locker and go "Pedoplex: One each, check!" and drive back. Not kidding at all. Then the guy moved to Austrailia. All of a sudden, in 2005, this freaking thing shows up in our inventory, marked as "missing", with a value of negative $1.5 million. Meaning even if we had been able to locate TWO (not to mention one) of everything on our inventory list, we were still waaaaaaay over quota for dollar amount of missing equipment.
What ensues? Did we call the guy and ask if we could get into his storage locker? Did we write the piece of equipment off? Did we mark its value to be, say, $5,000? No, none of those things. The administration called the guy a thief (he was given the device), said that we lost valuable state property and should be held accountable (wtf, i'm a sysadmin, not a gopher, and this was before I was employed), and started a bickering shouting match between inventory, provost, and the department.
Your tax dollars at work!
's ok, though, after the 2nd year in a row when the professor who makes $220,000/yr for 5 hours of work per week who's my boss told me "sorry there's no money for a raise, we'll just keep paying you the legal minimum we can pay you in your pay grade", I left all that crap behind and got a job working for Rackspace, which is waaaay more awesome.
~W
sig?
seriously, I think you are allowed to legally 'dumpster dive' if something is thrown away, I know that it applies to people who leave stuff on the curb in residential areas, in most states that I know of.
I used to work in the IT department of a Highschool, and we came up with a great way of dealing with this issue.
In it's infinite wisdom, the school district would put the inventory barcode on the computer case, and inventory it as a computer, rather than inventory the components. So when we were done with a computer, and it was ready to be decomissioned, we would strip out the case. Everything that was usable would come out. Power supplies, NIC's, HD's, Mother Boards, etc. These would then be put into storage, and used to maintain and upgrade the rest of the computers. (Filling up RAM slots, adding extra HD's, etc.) This way, we would always have a supply of spare parts on hand in case we needed to replace a faulty component, and repair components wouldn't come out of our budget. (That way we could buy more and better new machines.) The cases would be sent to surplus.
As a side benefit, if anyone's personal machine broke down, there was a huge supply of good parts to use.
My ex-wife started a program at Heartland Community College in Bloomington Illinois. Started off as a class for 10 - 15 year olds but expanded to include classes for adults. Computers that were being cycled out of inventory were broken down into components by the IT department.
Students pay their $90 enrollment fee and are given a "kit" to use in the instructor-led class. They learn about the individual components and how they work together, assemble the computers and get some simple troubleshooting experience when one component or another doesn't work.
They then learn how to load an operating system, get their machines onto a network, and at the end of the class get to take home a working computer with 4 year old hardware for $75 plus a bit of sweat equity, not a bad deal for a kid whose family can't afford a computer. The class takes place in 5 two-hour sessions over the course of a week.
It's been popular enough that the local university (Illinois State) and a major employer in the area (State Farm Insurance) have taken to donating old machines to Heartland for the program. Saves on the recycling costs and gives young kids a jump start in the basics of computers.
partially regruntled codemonkey bloomington, illinois