The Right to Repair remains the driving force behind increased repair legislation. IT refresh cycles are getting shorter, and excess IT equipment is piling up. Decommissioned assets get put on the back burner once they’re no longer in use because IT teams believe they are useless. However, value doesn’t end at decommissioning. Retired IT assets still have life left, especially those in use for less than a year. Today’s blog post explains how the right to repair is influencing the expansion of device lifecycles, and the role reuse plays in supporting a circular economy.
The Expansion & Challenges of Right to Repair
The Right to Repair movement began in 2012 in Massachusetts. Starting with auto repair complaints, the movement has grown and become a global phenomenon. From farm equipment and vehicles to personal devices like phones and AirPods, the right to repair has reached every corner of the technological landscape, and it becomes more crucial as technology evolves faster.
Large tech OEMs have become notorious for restricting repair access by withholding the tools, parts, and information third-party repair shops need, forcing users to go directly to the manufacturer for repairs. The right-to-repair movement primarily seeks to secure the legal right for consumers and independent repair shops to freely maintain, modify, and fix the products they own. By advocating for fair, equal access to the resources needed to complete repairs, the movement directly combats repair monopolies.
Years later, the movement continues to grow, with Texas recently joining Colorado, Washington, and Connecticut in efforts to pass a repair bill. HB2963 went into effect Sept. 1, 2026, and requires OEMs to be more flexible with tools and information required for device repairs. While the bill makes Texas the tenth U.S. state to pass repair legislation, all 50 states have officially filed or are pending similar legislation. Additionally, major OEMs such as Apple and Microsoft have changed their stance on device repair in recent years and started adjusting repair policies to be more flexible.
The Vital Role of Reuse In The Circular Economy
As a major industry topic, the circular economy focuses on reducing, reusing, and recycling materials. The circular economy model replaces the traditional “take, make, waste” system and focuses on three pillars: Eliminating waste and pollution, circulating products and materials, and regenerating nature. Device reuse helps close the circular loop by keeping used electronics in circulation rather than diverting them to e-waste streams. This reduces demand for new devices, lowers carbon output, and helps prevent landfill battery fires. Recycling is a natural option because it’s heavily marketed, but it doesn’t improve sustainability. Recycling provides end-of-life management at a higher energy and carbon cost, whereas reuse is an end-of-use service designed to extend IT lifecycles beyond decommissioning.
Poor E-Waste Disposal Leads to Pollution
The world generates approximately 62 million tonnes of e-waste annually. Most of it ends up in landfills, and only a small percentage is reused. One of the main reasons e-waste isn’t reused is improper disposal. Electronic devices such as phones, laptops, tablets, earbuds, fitness trackers, and even office tech such as cameras and badge scanners all contain metals that produce toxic chemicals. In landfills, these chemicals soak into the soil and pollute the surrounding water supply. This pollution affects nearby residents and can cause fatal illnesses. These devices also contain lithium-ion batteries that can cause large-scale chemical fires. Proper IT asset disposition is crucial, but decommissioning doesn’t mean assets are useless.
The ITAD Angle: Value Doesn’t End at Decommission
Once assets are decommissioned, their value doesn’t end. ITAD providers extend value in three ways after assets are retired, and discarding reusable devices prematurely deprives organizations of environmental, financial, and social opportunities.
Repair & Resale – Retired doesn’t mean obsolete. Decommissioned devices still hold significant secondary market value and can be repaired, refurbished, and resold. Depending on how well value is preserved, enterprises can potentially use resale revenue to fund IT refresh cycles without dipping into budget funds.
Parts Harvesting – Not all non-functioning devices are useless. Parts harvesting enables working parts such as a camera or screen to be removed and placed into a working device for reuse.
Materials Recovery – Materials recovery involves physically destroying storage media that cannot be erased and extracting resources. During this stage, devices are sent to Smelters that isolate precious metals such as gold, palladium, and copper from circuit boards.
The Challenge of Unenrollment
Though reuse is integral to circularity, the industry still faces challenges that hinder the process, chief among them unenrollment. HOBI’s president, Craig Boswell, discussed the issue in episode 2 of the HOBI Conversations podcast, describing it as “the biggest challenge facing the industry.” Unenrollment occurs when corporate devices are decommissioned but never removed from the company’s network. When ITAD teams go to power up these devices, they cannot get beyond the BIOS. This also applies to OEMs like Apple, which use programs such as Apple Business Manager to lock devices to the OEM. As a result, the entire ITAD process for that load is paused until it can be resolved. The ITAD provider reports the locked devices back to the client’s disposition manager. The disposition manager escalates to IT. IT unenrolls the devices, or most of them. The ITAD provider rechecks and often finds that a subset remains locked, and the cycle repeats. This reduces asset value because decommissioned devices sit idle until a resolution is reached, depreciating by the minute.
According to Boswell, the solution lies in marrying ITAD and ITAM processes to create a vision of total global asset management from the minute they arrive to their final disposition. Boswell also discussed the unenrollment issue at E-Scrap 2026.
Extend The Lifecycle of Decommissioned Assets With an ITAD Plan
Value doesn’t end at decommissioning, and neither should use. Repair laws are changing, and remarketing decommissioned IT assets can help companies increase enterprise ROI, reduce e-waste, and mitigate environmental liability. As technology evolves rapidly, many organizations struggle to keep up. ITAD providers reduce stress by providing a proactive roadmap for successful IT asset disposition, including value recovery through repair, resale, parts harvesting, and materials recovery.
Contact HOBI at 877-814-2620 or sales@hobi.com for a decommissioning consultation.