Glossary
IT asset renewal, ITAD and hardware trading terms.
20 terms, defined the way TAR uses them. Several of these are used loosely across the industry, and the looseness is expensive — so each definition says what the term actually means, not what it is often assumed to mean.
- ITAD
- IT asset disposition — the managed process of removing IT equipment from service and deciding whether it is reused, resold, recovered for components or recycled. Distinct from disposal, which simply means getting rid of something.
- WEEE
- Waste electrical and electronic equipment. Any electrical or electronic item that has reached the end of its usable life, handled as a separate waste stream because it contains both recoverable and carefully-handled materials.
- Asset recovery
- The stage of the lifecycle where equipment coming out of service is evaluated to identify the most valuable responsible outcome — normally reuse — before anything is treated as waste.
- Remarketing
- Preparing, describing and positioning used equipment so it reaches the buyer who values it most, rather than simply the first buyer available.
- Refurbishment
- Testing, repairing, cleaning and reconfiguring used equipment so it can return to productive service.
- Surplus equipment
- Working equipment an organisation no longer needs. Surplus describes ownership, not condition — surplus equipment is frequently new or nearly new.
- End-of-life equipment
- Equipment that has reached the end of its usefulness to its current owner. It is not necessarily at the end of its working life, which is the distinction the whole reuse market depends on.
- Degaussing
- Applying a strong magnetic field to erase a magnetic storage device. It erases user data and also the factory servo information the drive requires to operate, so a degaussed drive can never function again.
- Low-health drive
- A drive that still operates but reports degraded condition — reallocated sectors, pending sectors or reduced performance. It remains intact and can still be evaluated.
- Dead drive
- A drive that does not spin up, is not detected, or fails to initialise, but is physically undamaged. Dead is a functional description, not a physical one.
- Hot-swap bay
- A drive bay that allows a drive to be removed and replaced while the system is running. The caddies and trays that fit these bays carry real value and should stay with their equipment.
- Rack unit (U)
- The standard height measurement for rack-mounted equipment. One rack unit is 44.45 mm; a 2U server occupies two of them.
- Landed cost
- The total cost of getting goods to their destination — purchase price plus freight, handling, documentation and duties. In international trading it is part of the price, not an addition to it.
- Consolidation
- Combining shipments from several suppliers or several lots into one movement, to make freight economics work on quantities that would not justify shipping alone.
- R2v3
- A responsible recycling standard for the electronics reuse and recycling industry. TAR does not hold this or any other certification, and works with certified processors where they are required.
- Chain of custody
- The documented record of who held equipment at each stage between leaving its original site and reaching its final destination.
- Circular economy
- An economic model in which products, components and materials are kept in use for as long as they are useful, rather than following a straight line from manufacture to disposal.
- Component recovery
- Removing reusable parts — memory, processors, drives, boards, power supplies — from equipment that cannot be reused as a whole unit.
- Material recovery
- Separating equipment into material streams such as circuit boards, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, plastics and cable copper for recycling. The last stage, not the first.
- Grade
- A shorthand condition classification used in used-hardware trading. Grades are not standardised across the industry, so a stated grade should always be accompanied by a description of what it means.
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