Product Reuse

Customers who participate in Sun's hardware upgrade program can, at no cost, return their end-of-life equipment (including equipment from competitors) to Sun for recycling and proper disposal. These used computer equipment are collected and sent to a third-party asset recovery vendor who recovers useful parts that are returned to Sun for remanufacture and re-use, often as field replacement units for equipment in the field.  Much of what is not returned to Sun is recovered, refurbished and resold by the third party vendor. Components and assemblies that have no commercial value as functioning systems or components are broken down for recovery of metals and plastics. 

These recovered assets originate from several sources:

• Sun excess or obsolete inventory.
• The Customer Return for Credit Program, for customers who upgrade their systems with newer Sun products, have gone out of business, or received materials that they did not order.

• Proprietary parts such as EPROM (erasable, programmable, read-only memory) chips are destroyed or erased; a partner company then extracts them from circuit boards, straightens their leads, tests and repackages them, and sells them for reuse.
• What's left of the circuit board is shredded and processed to extract the precious metals - gold, platinum, palladium, copper and silver.
• After processing, disk drives, power supplies and memory are resold often at a price that covers the costs of the recycling program.