What IT Equipment Do We Pick Up?

One of the most common questions we get is “do you take ____?” So here’s the definitive guide to what we pick up, what we don’t, and why.

Quick context for anyone landing here for the first time: GreenIT Pickup is a free, business-to-business IT equipment pickup service headquartered in Southlake, covering the whole Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Free pickup works because functional equipment gets refurbished and put back into use, and the rest is recovered for materials — not because there’s a bill coming later.

What We Pick Up

Servers — Rack-mount, tower, blade servers. Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, Lenovo ThinkSystem, Supermicro, and everything else. Working or not. This is our bread and butter. Enterprise servers — even older generations — often have significant component value in processors, memory, and drives. See our server recycling service for details.

Networking Equipment — Switches, routers, firewalls, access points, and wireless controllers. Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Meraki, Ubiquiti, Palo Alto, Fortinet — we take it all. Note that some networking gear stores configurations and credentials in flash memory, which is one more reason it shouldn’t go in a dumpster.

Storage Arrays and SAN Equipment — NetApp, Dell EMC, Pure Storage, HPE, IBM. Disk shelves, controllers, SFPs, and fiber channel cards. Storage equipment is data-bearing by definition, so every drive gets pulled and tracked.

Desktop Computers — Business-class desktops like Dell OptiPlex, HP EliteDesk, and Lenovo ThinkCentre. We do take consumer-grade desktops, but they typically carry less recovery value.

Laptops — Business and consumer laptops. Working laptops, even older ones, often have good resale value. Our laptop and desktop recycling service covers everything from individual machines to full fleet refreshes. Chromebooks count too — if you’re a school district staring down a pile of past-AUE Chromebooks, our Chromebook fleet retirement guide covers that specific situation.

Monitors — LCD and LED flat panels. We do NOT take CRT monitors (the old heavy tube-style monitors) — those require specialized handling due to lead content.

UPS Systems and Batteries — Rack-mount and tower UPS units from APC, Eaton, Tripp Lite, CyberPower, and Vertiv. The batteries inside these units are classified as hazardous waste and need to be handled properly — we make sure they go to the right downstream processor.

Rack Hardware — Server racks, rail kits, PDUs (power distribution units), cable management, blanking panels, and rack shelving.

Cabling — Copper network cables (Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a), fiber optic cables, power cables, and SFP modules. Yes, even boxes of tangled Cat5 in a closet.

Telecom Equipment — VoIP phones, PBX systems, and conference room equipment.

Thin Clients and Point-of-Sale Systems — Wyse, HP, and Dell thin clients, along with commercial POS terminals. These often contain storage media that needs proper data handling.

Components and Accessories — RAM, CPUs, hard drives, SSDs, PCIe cards, GPU cards, and power supplies. If it came out of a computer, we’ll take it. Storage media is handled through our hard drive destruction process to ensure data is properly sanitized before any resale or recycling.

What We Don’t Pick Up

CRT Monitors — The lead content requires specialized recycling we don’t handle in-house.

Large Appliances — Refrigerators, microwaves, coffee machines. We’re IT equipment, not general electronics.

Consumer Electronics — Personal TVs, gaming consoles, home routers. We focus on business and enterprise equipment.

Furniture — Even if it’s a computer desk. We’re here for the equipment, not the furniture it sat on.

Printers & Copiers (on their own) — We don’t schedule pickups for printers or copiers alone. However, if you have a larger equipment pickup that includes printers, we’re happy to take them along with everything else.

Hazardous Materials — Beyond UPS batteries (which we do handle), we don’t take items like toner cartridges in bulk, chemical cleaning supplies, or other non-IT hazardous materials.

Working or Broken — Both Are Fine

Another question we hear constantly: “does it need to work?” No.

Working equipment is worth more, because it can be refurbished and resold — that’s the engine that makes free pickup possible. But dead servers, laptops with cracked screens, switches that won’t boot, and desktops that got cooked in a power event are all fair game. Non-functional equipment still has component and materials value, and it still has drives in it that need proper data handling. Don’t spend your team’s time diagnosing what works before we arrive; we’ll sort it on our end.

The one thing worth knowing: the longer equipment sits, the less of it is refurbishable. A five-year-old server has options. A twelve-year-old server is mostly scrap metal. If it’s already retired, there’s no upside to waiting.

What About the Data on It?

Anything with storage — servers, desktops, laptops, thin clients, POS terminals, NAS boxes, loose drives — gets its media addressed before resale or recycling. Drives are sanitized following NIST 800-88 guidelines as part of our standard free service, and certificates of data sanitization are available with your pickup documentation.

If your organization’s policy requires physical destruction, that’s available as a paid add-on — including onsite hard drive shredding if you need drives destroyed at your facility before anything leaves the building. This matters most for healthcare, legal, and financial organizations with strict internal mandates, but any business can request it.

Common Pickup Scenarios

The list above covers individual items, but most pickups fall into a few recognizable patterns:

The hardware refresh. New laptops arrived, old ones are stacked in a conference room. This is the most common job we do, from 10 machines to several hundred.

The server room or IT closet cleanout. A rack (or three) of retired gear that’s been accumulating since the last refresh. Our server room cleanout guide walks through the whole process step by step.

The office move or closure. Everything must go by a lease deadline. We coordinate around your moving schedule and building access.

The data center or colo exit. Larger scale, more logistics, same principle. See our data center decommissioning and colocation decommissioning services.

The inherited pile. Landlords and property managers regularly find abandoned IT equipment when tenants leave. If that’s you, our guide to tenant-abandoned IT equipment covers what to do with gear you don’t even own.

Minimum Pickup Size

We offer free pickups in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — see our full services overview for details — but we do generally need a reasonable volume to justify the trip. A single desktop computer usually doesn’t warrant a standalone pickup. A shelf of laptops, a couple of servers, a stack of switches plus the cable box — that does. And there’s no upper limit: whether you’re in Dallas, Fort Worth, Plano, or anywhere else in the metroplex, we’ll scale the truck and crew to the job.

If you’re unsure whether your pile qualifies, just reach out and describe what you have. We’ll let you know honestly — and our FAQ covers the most common minimum-quantity questions.

Not Sure If We Take It?

When in doubt, ask. Send us a message or give us a call at (817) 527-8600 describing what you’ve got. Include photos if possible — it helps us assess quickly. Worst case, we point you to someone who can help.

Have equipment to get rid of? Tell us what you’ve got and we’ll schedule a pickup →