Episode 2 of HOBI Conversations is live. HOBI President Craig Boswell sat down to cover the issues commanding the most attention in the ITAD industry right now, and a few that haven’t received enough attention yet.
Craig has spent more than three decades building and running one of the most respected IT asset disposition companies in the country. His perspective on where the industry is headed isn’t theoretical. It comes from processing millions of enterprise devices across three facilities, managing a global partner network, and sitting across the table from IT asset managers at some of the world’s largest enterprises.
A Changing Industry Landscape Driven by Technological Evolution
ITAD is always changing. As technology evolves, IT asset disposition adjusts to new norms, requirements, and needs. However, with each new wave of technology, new challenges arise, and ITAD providers face several major industry obstacles that cost vendors and clients time, money, and value.
“We are having to handle devices all over the planet.”
One of the industry’s biggest challenges is international management of devices. Historically, even the biggest organizations took an ad hoc approach to retiring devices across global locations. That’s changing.
“Most companies like ours deal with very large enterprises that have operations and facilities all over the world,” Craig said. “Traditionally, even these large enterprises have had an ad hoc approach to managing those devices. Now they’re realizing there’s a lot of risk in that approach. They are wisely seeking the experts in the space to help them handle the global management of devices.”
The risk Craig is describing is real and growing. The Basel Convention’s 2025 amendments and the EU’s new Digital Waste Shipment System, which took effect this month, have added significant compliance complexity to cross-border flows of devices. Country-specific e-waste regulations, cultural differences in how retirement programs are administered, and inconsistent data privacy requirements across jurisdictions all create exposure for organizations that haven’t centralized their ITAD strategy.
“This is the biggest challenge facing the industry.”
The conversation quickly shifted to what Craig considers the most significant operational problem in ITAD today: devices arriving at disposition facilities still enrolled in device management platforms like Microsoft Intune, Apple Business Manager, and VMware Workspace One.
“When you go to power up these devices, if they’re remote managed, you can’t get beyond the BIOS in a lot of cases,” Craig explained. “Or if it’s Apple Business Manager, a message is going to come up and say this particular device is the property of this entity. The traditional process of get it in, do your initial inventory, test it, erase it, and get it to final disposition is now stopped, frozen in place.”
What follows is a coordination chain spanning multiple teams that can take weeks or months to resolve. The ITAD provider reports the locked devices back to the client’s disposition manager. The disposition manager escalates to the IT department. IT unenrolls the devices, or most of them. The ITAD provider rechecks and often finds that a subset remains locked. The cycle repeats.
Craig described the operational impact directly: “We envision this process like Henry Ford on the conveyor line where we put it in the front end and it comes out the back end. This particular problem is causing that assembly line to take all these turns and stops.”
The scale of the problem has grown sharply. Three years ago, Craig estimates that 5 to 8 percent of devices arriving at HOBI’s facilities were still enrolled. Today that number has reached 30 percent across the mobility category, laptops, tablets, and phones. That’s nearly one in three devices arriving with a problem that halts processing and can’t be resolved without client intervention.
“Hardware changes are going to be surprisingly complex for disposition managers.”
“Hardware changes are going to be surprisingly complex for disposition managers as we look at both the very small devices and the very big devices,” Craig said.
On the small side, the concern is embedded lithium-ion batteries in corporate devices that go well beyond laptops and phones. Smartwatches, IoT devices, and other connected hardware tied to corporate networks all pose battery disposal challenges that most IT asset managers haven’t had to address before. “I don’t think IT managers that are dispositioning these realize what a challenge they are for the industry,” Craig said. Improperly handled lithium-ion batteries present a documented fire risk, and these devices are now finding their way into corporate retirement programs in volume.
On the large side, the issue is the data center. As enterprises build larger, more efficient data centers with advanced cooling technologies, the hardware undergoing decommissioning increasingly involves a mix of electronics and hazardous materials. “I think the mixture of hazardous materials in the cooling technologies with the electronics hardware is going to be something that the ITAD industry itself is even having a hard time catching up to,” Craig said. “This isn’t just an electronics issue. This is a hazardous material disposition issue.”
Data centers have expanded significantly, and cooling technologies are being introduced to support more efficient hardware. According to Boswell, the struggle with ITAD lies in the mixing of hazardous materials in cooling technology with electronic hardware. Technology is rapidly evolving, and the ITAD industry is struggling to keep up with tech advancements that require such delicate disposal.
“This isn’t just an electronics issue; this is a hazardous material disposition issue.”
Opportunities in The Challenges
Despite industry challenges, Boswell believes there are many opportunities among them as well.
“One of the things that a lot of organizations are missing, as our process gets more sophisticated, is the ability for ITAD and ITAM to kind of marry and create this vision of total global management of assets from the minute it arrives to final disposition.”
International device management, device locks, and battery-embedded devices are all issues that can be resolved or improved when IT asset disposition and IT asset management come together to create a cohesive process, and that’s what ITAD providers try to accomplish.
“And so, there’s challenges out there, but I also think some huge opportunities are coming for us to get much more sophisticated on how we marry these two processes, not only from a cost-effective standpoint for the organization, but from an overall circular economic sustainability perspective; there’s just some real opportunities there.”
Listen to the Full Episode
The conversation covers more ground than we’ve captured here, including a detailed breakdown of what a formal, auditable unenrollment process should look like and what asset managers should be demanding from their internal IT teams.
Work With HOBI
The ITAD industry is changing, and finding the right partner is crucial not just for the future of sustainability, but for cost-effective e-waste disposal solutions focused on increasing enterprise ROI. Subscribe to HOBI Conversations and contact HOBI to request a free consultation at 877-814-2620 or sales@hobi.com.