Computer Donations Help Caribbean Hospital

The tropical climate of the Dominican Republic is probably the farthest thing from a person’s mind when they donate a computer at ReCycle North’s Pine Street location. But 2004, ReCycle North provided 40 refurbished, network-ready, Pentium II computers to a rural Dominican hospital that primarily serves migrant Haitian farm workers.

The International Medical Equipment Collaborative (IMECA) is a non-profit organization that accumulates used, but functional, medical equipment and redistributes it to hospitals throughout the developing world. When they learned that ReCycle North refurbished computers, they asked if some of those computers could be added to a shipping container heading for the Dominican Republic.

As a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher, ReCycle North is able to take dissimilar and varied incoming computers, destroy existing data, and create standardized computer systems running licensed copies of Windows 2000 or Windows 98 depending on the hardware’s capacity. For both the donor and the end recipient, ReCycle North’s role is essential. The donor wants to make sure their data will be destroyed and that software license agreements won’t be violated. The recipient wants to be able to plug in their new computer and know that it’s going to work and that it is running a legally registered operating system. Additionally, ReCycle North diverts unusable equipment into environmentally friendly recycling outlets including a monitor recycling facility in Massachusetts.

ReCycle North’s “homogenization” process creates plug and play computer systems that are ready to use by the recipients, whether that recipient is a savvy, value-minded shopper in Burlington, or a struggling hospital in the Caribbean.