Until recently, it had been necessary to maintain data centers to disseminate, store, and manage electronic information for a computer network in data centers. Data center facilities house servers that perform data processing and other network-management functions and comprise parts of buildings or sometimes whole buildings.

At its peak, the United States federal government claimed to operate 10,584 data centers, as of 2016. The Department of Defense alone may have been responsible for as many as 3,000 to 6,000 data centers. Because the policy language defining what does and does not constitute a data center kept changing, it was difficult to keep an accurate count. What is certain is that the DoD operated at least twice as many data centers as any other federal agency.

Data centers are expensive to run. Facilities, labor, hardware, software, and electricity each cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Due to the unimaginable amounts of power required to not only power the servers but operate the climate control system that keeps them from overheating, data centers are not very energy efficient. In 2013, the Department of Defense was the largest energy consumer in the United States in part because of the amount of data centers it operated.

With the advent of cloud computing, large-scale data centers are no longer necessary. Because of the costs to taxpayers involved in operating them, more and more government agencies are closing data centers in favor of adopting cloud technology in their stead. Though there are no specific statistics regarding how many DoD data centers have closed, the Government Accountability Office claims that, out of the original 10,584 centers operating throughout the country, 4,300 had closed as of 2015.

The result is an incredible amount of electronic hardware in need to recycling or destruction and in an incalculable amount of data that most certainly needs to be destroyed from those servers and computers.

The question of what to do with unneeded military planes and other aircraft dates back to the post-World War II period. Approximately half of the nearly 300,000 aircraft built for the U.S. Armed Forces during that period were deemed to be surplus when the war was over, more than what was needed to defend the country during peacetime. Many of these planes went to storage and scrapping facilities to either be held in reserve until needed again or dismantled, salvaging the useful parts. These facilities are known colloquially as “boneyards.”

When a plane is decommissioned, many of the parts, including pieces of the engine, electronics from the cockpit, and other types of hardware, can be salvaged and recycled. The body of the plane is often melted down, and the aluminum formed into ingots for future use.

The more precisely munitions can hit a target, the more effective the strike will be. The U.S. military is currently taking the initiative to employ electro-optical smart munitions by upgrading to laser-guided rockets for unmanned aerial vehicles, armored vehicles, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. In May 2019, the Navy ordered an upgrade called the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon system. As systems get replaced and retrofitted on fighter jets and bombers, the older guidance systems and electronics to deploy munitions become obsolete.

At TechWaste Recycling, we already count several federal agencies among our clients, including the following:

• Federal Aviation Administration
• Coast Guard
• Immigration and Customs Enforcement
• Department of Homeland Security
• Internal Revenue Service
• NASA
• Department of Defense

Additionally, we also serve county government as well as countless corporate clients. Contact us to learn more about our services.