I’m currently fighting a losing battle on keeping good-enough equipment out of the recycling bin, because of bureaucratic nonsense. Assuming the recyclers are actually tearing down the components, we know that often a device isn’t fully recycled anyway. And I work for an organisation which supposedly, you know, actively fights climate change and has “sustainable development goals,” yet we sure do seem to constantly be getting rid of equipment that COULD find a use or could at least go to a better home.
I’ve got a 2010 MacBook Air that won’t take any kind of macOS (it appears there’s some kind of fault with the proprietary SSD controller?), BUT I have been able Linux on it. The department that asked me to install a modern macOS on it wanted to use it as a guest laptop. Now, seems to me, if it can run Elementary OS (as it does), it should perfectly work for that purpose. The interface is intuitive, and I have Firefox set up for it in the dock. We can’t support it, but I don’t really see a need to. If it were to break, then it would be disposed of, but it isn’t dead yet.
Yet, a supervisor saw I did that, figured out what I was planning to do, and basically has stopped me from handing it back like this to the department in question (it belongs to the department though, not us). I’ve managed to save a few other items from the bin, but they’re still organisational assets. I’m working with our inventory department to set up a formal auction, so at the very least maybe I can bid on everything and take it home, but it will take months likely to get that kind of thing rolling.
I f*cking HATE this attitude, it’s unnecessary, and it’s killing the planet. And it’s a major stressor in my job, I have to admit.