IT recycling firm AMI recovered £2.2m on secure equipment disposal last year

Irish IT recycling company AMI has announced a record £2.2m recovered from equipment recycled for clients in 2018, recovering a higher percentage of equipment value than ever before.

When a company upgrades its IT equipment, disposing of the old equipment in a secure and environmentally friendly way can be difficult and costly. The company's proprietary data will need to be securely erased from any computers, hard drives, USB sticks, and company smartphones disposed to prevent data breaches, and items such as smartphones contain lithium batteries that can be dangerous to dispose of and harmful to the environment.

IT recycling specialists AMI stepped in to solve this problem some time ago, and has grown over the years to service a wide range of clients from its Dublin and Belfast offices. The firm securely erases all data from disposed IT equipment, and where possible refurbishes and re-sells the items through its retail arm RefreshedByUs to actually return a profit to its clients rather than them sinking money into landfill and waste management costs.

AMI returned £2.2m in profit to clients through its IT recycling services, an increase of 25% in the last year alone. The company saw a sharp 270% rise in the number of desktop computers and laptops it could recover throughout 2018, re-selling 85,000 of them to produce the record profits. When including hard drives, USB sticks, tablets, and smartphones, the company processed around 435,000 for clients last year.

Equipment is disposed by a wide range of clients, from data centres and financial institutions to government deparments and large private companies. Safe disposal of data is quickly becoming a regulatory minefield thanks to privacy laws like GDPR creating additional liabilities in the case of serious data breaches. AMI's reputation for securely disposing of sensitive assets has been a big boon for the company, which is only four companies in the world to hold the highest level of accreditation from the Asset Disposal & Information Security Alliance (ADISA).

AMI Managing Director Philip McMichael commented on the stats, saying "Nine out of 10 of our customers don’t pay AMI a fee for the secure processing of their old and unwanted IT equipment, as the revenue we return to them from the refurbished and resold equipment covers the cost of our services. We are delighted that we increased returns to clients by 25% last year while also ensuring their old IT equipment was refurbished using ironclad processes."

Source: Written based on press release