Disposition Preferences: Tell Us What You Want Done
How one small field on the pickup request - reuse preferred, recycle only, or either - tells the bidding ITAD upfront what the customer expects to happen to the hardware.
Some customers want their retired hardware refurbished and given a second life; some have a policy that says nothing leaves the building intact; most are pragmatic and want the ITAD to decide. The disposition preference captures that intent at intake and rides along with the request into the Sourcing inbox, so the ITAD knows what it is pricing before it types a number.
What the customer picks
Disposition is the last section of the compliance step in the request wizard, not a step of its own. Three options: reuse preferred, recycle only, or either. It is one field for the whole request. There is no per-device override; a customer who needs two categories treated differently files two requests, which also gets them two cleaner bids.
Disposition is not data treatment
The same compliance step asks a separate question about data: whether the devices carry data, and whether the customer wants logical erasure, physical destruction, or both. Keeping the two apart matters. “Recycle only” says what happens to the box; “physical destruction” says what happens to the drive. A customer can want a laptop reused and its original SSD shredded, and the request can say exactly that.
How the ITAD reads it
On the Sourcing request detail the disposition preference sits with the other requirements - required certifications, required services, data-destruction method, whether an ESG report is expected - above the manifest. A “reuse preferred” lot of recent Latitudes is priced as hardware value coming back to the customer. A “recycle only” lot is priced as service work, and the bid’s net amount to the customer can go negative when required services cost more than the hardware offer. The customer sees that number before awarding. The manual cannot rescue a surprising figure with poetry, and neither can the wiki.
Why one field, early
Because the expensive misunderstanding in trade-in is not the price, it is the assumption behind the price. An ITAD that quoted for resale and is told at the dock that everything must be recycled has a margin problem and a customer problem on the same afternoon. Putting the preference on the request means every bid was written against the same expectation. Whatever happens at receiving - and grading still happens at receiving - nobody can say they were not told.