Hey all,

I have acquired a fair amount of old telecom equipment (KSUs, analog/digital telephone sets, system cards etc.) that are mostly non-functional and I no longer need. I have held on to them in order to repair and resell them if necessary but as more of my customers upgrade to new systems I have more and more old inventory that I have no use for. I have tried to take a couple of cabinets to local recyclers over the years but they have refused to take them. At this point I'm just running out of space and need to get rid of a bunch of this old equipment any way I can but would rather not break any dumping laws if possible.

Any recommendations?

Recyclers are supposed to take electronic waste. Have you tried recently since it became illegal to throw it in the dumpster or garbage? Funny, we used to get $.01/lb until it became illegal. Now they just take it.

I see you're in CA. Don't they have like a binder full of regulations punishable by death on how to dispose of electronic waste?

-Hal

AES Electronics Recycling Inc. located in Fullerton is listed as an electronics recycling facility.

hbiss, I haven't been to any recyclers recently, it's possible I just haven't found the right place. The couple that I've tried were only interested in cell phones or PCs. And I don't know the exact regulations but it is CA so I am sure there are plenty. I'm still adjusting to the grocery bag ban.

fonemanlee, I will give them a call and see what they say, thank you for finding that for me.

edit: AES says they'll take whatever I've got. Guess I'll be stopping there shortly. Thank you.

The town I live in (although not in California) will accept non-hazardous electronic waste if I drive the items to the town's Public Works building. There is a covered cart located outside one of the entrances.

I just have to go to the office, show and ID describe what is being disposed of and assure that printers, if applicable, have no ink or toner still inside. The last time I disposed of some old printers, I saw some Polycom & Cisco phones had been tossed in.

Does your city/town have such a service?

right now the govt agency I am working for has me "wiping" the incoming call logs and memory buttons off of +/- 1800 Nortel sets of different models before we send them out for recycling.

Its a real pain when some of the sets have up to 40 incoming calls logged and the delete key has to be hit for each call. Others I can use the # key to clear everything.

I should be happy I am paid by the hour to do it and I figure its going to take at least 4 days to do it.

I would think running them over with your truck would be a lot quicker.

-Hal

Once again Hal has the best solution.

tablesaw or bandsaw should do the trick too.

Previous consultant they had said they could get $18 CDN per phone a few years ago from a used set broker, but they sat on them. Not sure if management thinks they will be worth more now if they look for a buyer.

After doing a about another 80 or 90 today I'd settle for tapping them with a sledge hammer to "wipe the memory".

I'd still have to pull off the telephone number tags out of the scrap to keep the new VP of IT Security happy as he doesn't want to see any link back to the company on the phones.

220 Vac on the line cord should have a satisfactory effect.

Just wondering when the telephone companies use to own the sets how would they wipe out any caller lists or stored number keys when they refurbished the sets?

I would think that, like with an iPhone there is a reset that wipes all personal information and brings it back to factory defaults.

At least there should be...

-Hal

Back in the day (30 years ago) when GTE upgraded their feature phones to a new release, it was discovered that deleting all client information from the sets would have to be done manually.

They crushed them all and melted them down.

It was cheaper.

Sam

Thanks for that Sam. I wonder if taking the 1000 +/- sets to the same place that the disk drives get shredded at would be an option?

Have to talk to the IT security crew after the long weekend (here in Canada) to see if their shredding contractor could do that?

Disc drives get "shredded" with a large degaussing coil

Memory in phones is solid state RAM and is largely unaffected by magnetic fields. So that isn't going to work.

However THESE will do it.

-Hal

Looked online last night and the shredding company the IT division uses for disks, does unwanted/defective product shredding back at their warehouse.

Must be the same large hammer mill they use for the disk drives as they show pictures of the finished product of disk destruction being confetti sized.