Are you an IT professional with bulk electronics ready to recycle?
Upgrading at the office? Free Geek Twin Cities is happy to accept your old IT and enterprise electronic equipment. Your donation helps affordable technology available to the community, and makes your business more sustainable.
We accept equipment all kinds of equipment to be re-used and refurbished. This includes computers, monitors, laptops, servers, server racks, old Ethernet spools, wireless access points, PoE devices and distributors, switches, routers, and more! We have a full list of everything that we normally accept on our accepted electronics list. Let us know if you don’t see something on there.
If you are a business or IT professional, please contact us at geeks@freegeektwincities.org before bringing your donation. Knowing what you plan to donate helps us prepare for a large donation.
What’s Free Geek Twin Cities?
Free Geek Twin Cities has been tackling the digital divide since 2009. We work with our local community to refurbish and rebuild affordable computers. As a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit Organization, we were inspired by the Free Geek in Portland to help reduce e-waste in our local community. Since then, we have dedicated our team to redistributing affordable computers to the people who need them the most. We also work on educating our volunteers on building, refurbishing, and using electronics.
Free Geek Twin Cities works with all businesses looking to offload older electronic equipment. We need your donations to get computers in the hands of the people who need them. While your computers may be old, they are still capable of helping the community, and we work hard to make that happen.
Free Geek Twin Cities has a very strict Data Destruction Guarantee.
Most hard drives (HDDs) donated to us are wiped using a secure, open-source wiping program called DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke.) DBAN writes junk bytes to the entire HDD, completely erasing the data.
For SSDs, we use Parted Magic, which uses ATA Secure Erase, a built-in function of the drive to completely factory reset the drive.
Hard drives that do not meet our refurbishing standards will have their platters destroyed by a press. Then we will recycle the remains with a local electronics recycler.
These processes happen securely behind a locked cage that can only be accessed by authorized Free Geek Twin Cities staff members. Whatever your data comes on, we will make sure that it gets destroyed.
While Free Geek Twin Cities attempts to reuse every device donated to us, some devices cannot be fixed or used. For these devices, we have our Recycling volunteers! Our volunteers help tear down these devices into components and categories, such as circuit boards, steel, aluminum, copper, etc. These components are then recycled with a local county certified raw material processor.