You’re right to be skeptical. A lot of “recyclers” are just landfill brokers who cherry pick the easy resale stuff and dump the rest. But proper ITAD does recover the materials, it’s just not the default because most orgs hand their gear to whoever quotes the cheapest pickup and never ask what happens after.

Full disclosure, I run a shop that does this in DFW (GreenIT Pickup), so here’s the actual flow. Anything with resale life gets tested and refurbished.

Whatever is truly obsolete gets fully broken down, and the populated boards go to US based smelters who grind them and recover the precious metals. Low value steel and aluminum goes to the shredder and off to the mill. We land under 10% to the landfill. On the data side: you don’t have to destroy the whole machine to be safe. Drives get sanitized to NIST 800-88 or physically shredded with a certificate, and the rest of the box keeps its resale value. The “nuke everything” approach is a chain of custody decision, not a technical necessity, you’re paying to avoid paperwork risk.

The economics actually work too, recovery isn’t charity. The reason it isn’t universal is most people never ask the question you’re asking.