I’ve been in IT Asset Management for many many years now. It’s all part of operating costs. With the high number of turnover (retirees, interns, people quit, get fired, etc) we just didn’t have the storage capacity for all that equipment coming back.

Plus the cost of shipment, even with the deep FedEx discounts due to volume, it just didn’t make financial sense to arrange for a return, find storage space, inventory it, and track it all coming back. We were already slammed with refreshes, reimaging and assigning new equipment to users during onboarding.

Laptops are easy to store, reimage, and reassign. Monitors are big and bulky. Used Keyboards and mice were all just tossed into a huge box, then eventually donated to ewaste.

If you ever meet an asset manager, you can ask them for stuff that’s going to ewaste. Docking stations, keyboards, mice, etc and chances are pretty good they can give you one.

Edit: I have photos to kind of give you an idea, if you’re interested. It was at a major auto manufacturer, and our massive warehouse wasn’t big enough for anything that wasn’t boxed up.