HPE’s Erskine centre refurbishes 150,000 technology assets a month

HPE’s Technology Renewal Centre (TRC) in Erskine, Scotland, repairs and reuses technology returned by customers. TechRadar’s Mike Moore reports that the facility processes around 150,000 assets a month.

The centre opened on December 8, 1987, and has operated as a renewal centre since 2011. Its 240,000-square-foot site handles equipment from HPE and other vendors. HPE says 85% of the servers and 97% of the workstations and PCs it receives are sanitized, tested and processed on site for resale.

HPE estimates that 84% of the assets processed at Erskine and its sister site in Andover, Massachusetts, are refurbished and returned to use; the rest are recycled. The Erskine team also dismantles some older devices for reusable parts and tests reassembled equipment before it is sold.

To address data security, HPE formats and rewrites storage drives, and uses additional software to check that they have been cleaned. The company estimates it has overwritten around 1.6 million drives, sanitizing 1.7 exabytes of data.

HPE says its packaging for refurbished items uses exterior material made from 100% recycled corrugate and interior foam made from 100% biodegradable starch. It estimates that its work has kept more than 8.4 million kilograms of electronic waste out of landfill.