ASCDI Renames to The ITAD Association, Stakes a Standards-Body Position in a Fragmented Industry
The 50-year-old trade association has formalized its dual US/EU identity, sits as the first-listed DAO member of the OBADA blockchain registry project, and has been an Associated partner in the EU's CIRPASS-2 Digital Product Passport pilot since early 2024. The April webinar made the full posture public.
On the April edition of its monthly webinar series, Joe Marion, president of the trade association formerly known as ASCDI, opened the call with an announcement that has not yet been covered by the trade press. "I want to welcome you to April's edition of the ITAD Association Webinar Series," Marion said, "and that's our new name. We've recently renamed ASCDI. We're now called the ITAD Association." ¹
For an organization with roots in the 1970s, the rebrand is more than cosmetic. It is the most explicit move by any established US trade association in the ITAD industry to claim the territory the industry has not had — a standards-body position, in a market where standards have historically been issued by independent certification bodies and enforced inconsistently across the operators who claim them.
In the same opening segment, Marion confirmed three additional moves that, taken together, suggest a coordinated repositioning rather than a logo refresh:
"On top of that, we incorporated the ITAD Association in the EU, so now we're both the EU and the US not-for-profit association."
"On top of that, we incorporated the ITAD Association in the EU, so now we're both the EU and the US not-for-profit association."
"ASCDI recently has taken over stewardship of the OBADA standard. The OBADA standard is a standard by which people in the ITAD industry will share the various silos of information, so data erasure companies, refurb companies, and so forth will be able to share the status of products throughout its lifecycle."
"We're also involved with CIRPASS, which is the European Union organization that's rolling out the digital product passport." ²
Each of these is independently significant. Together they describe an association moving from membership-directory function into infrastructure-standards function — a transition that, if it succeeds, would meaningfully change the institutional landscape Compare ITAD's editorial coverage has been describing as structurally vacant.
What the rebrand actually is
ASCDI — the Association of Service, Communications, Data, and ITAD Providers — was founded in 1975. ³ It has approximately 360+ member companies globally, draws members from across the IT reseller, ITAD provider, data erasure, and third-party maintenance segments, and has historically operated as a membership directory with an ethics enforcement function (the ASCDI Code of Ethics) and a member-accreditation portal at itadcertify.com. Its primary recurring industry event has been the annual disposITion summit.
The organization's last several years have been characterized by a gradual reorientation toward the ITAD vertical specifically. The name change formalizes that reorientation. What is less widely recognized is that the institutional groundwork — the OBADA DAO membership, the CIRPASS-2 Associated partner role — predates the rebrand by years. The CIRPASS-2 selection was publicly announced by ASCDI in February 2024. The OBADA DAO membership is documented on the foundation's published member list. The dual US/EU not-for-profit incorporation completes a posture the association has been building toward over multiple years. The April webinar made the full posture publicly visible in a single segment in a way it had not been before.
What OBADA is, and the nature of ASCDI's involvement
OBADA — the Open Blockchain for Asset Disposition Architecture — was founded in 2017 as a coalition of ITAD industry stakeholders. ⁴ It operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation and a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and its work product is an ITAD blockchain registry that uses cryptographic addressing to link physical assets to permanent, traceable digital records keyed off serial numbers. The Foundation is developing ISO 20435, an open international standard for cryptographic proof of proper data destruction and responsible recycling. ⁵
In plain language: OBADA is attempting to build a tamper-evident, interoperable record-keeping layer for the ITAD industry, of the kind that would allow downstream parties — auditors, regulators, OEMs, secondary-market buyers — to verify what actually happened to an asset between the point at which it left the original owner and the point at which it entered final disposition. The industry's documented gap — the gap visible in the 4 million tonnes of EU equipment unaccounted for in regulator reporting, the gap visible in the ESET 2023 finding that 13 of 18 enterprise routers acquired secondhand still contained recoverable security credentials — is the gap OBADA was founded to address.
The OBADA DAO publishes its member list at the foundation's website. ⁶ As of the January 2025 update — the most recent listing publicly available at time of writing — ASCDI appears as the first-listed DAO member, with Joe Marion identified as the contact and the organization's mission paragraph rendered alongside its logo. Marion's framing on the April webinar — that the association has "taken over stewardship" of the OBADA standard — appears to describe the operational reality of the association's role in the DAO rather than a wholesale institutional transfer; the OBADA Foundation continues to operate as a separately constituted nonprofit. The distinction matters for how the standard's governance is understood, but it does not diminish the significance of the association's seat at the DAO's decision-making table. Among 30-plus listed DAO members from across the global ITAD industry, ASCDI's positioning is institutional rather than as one of many vendor-operator participants.
CIRPASS-2 Associated Partner status: the European regulatory connection
CIRPASS-2 is the European Commission's funded pilot project for the Digital Product Passport, running from May 2024 to April 2027 with a 49-partner consortium across textiles, electronics, tyres, and construction value chains. ⁷ The project's goal is to demonstrate functioning Digital Product Passports in real-world settings, contribute to EU standardization on the DPP, and prepare for at-scale deployment under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation.
ASCDI announced its CIRPASS-2 selection on February 22, 2024, formally identifying its role as an Associated partner in the project. ⁸ The association's own framing of why it was selected reads, in part: "By coupling its knowledge of the ITAD industry with its involvement with the OBADA decentralized asset tracing project, the ASCDI will bring a unique perspective to the CIRPASS efforts on the European DPP project." The dual involvement — OBADA on one side, CIRPASS-2 on the other — is described by the association itself as complementary.
The Digital Product Passport is one of the most consequential regulatory developments facing the global electronics industry. When it deploys at scale across the EU — currently anticipated for 2027 onward — manufacturers, distributors, and downstream actors including ITAD operators will be required to attach and maintain structured data about every product placed on the EU market across its full lifecycle, from manufacture through end-of-life processing.
An ITAD trade association with a documented seat at the CIRPASS-2 table is positioned to shape what that data layer looks like for ITAD-specific transactions. ASCDI's Associated partner status was confirmed in its own February 2024 announcement; the connection to the OBADA-based asset tracing work is framed as the substantive contribution the association brings to the consortium.
The Copenhagen meeting
The ITAD Association has scheduled a meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark on June 9, 2026. Billy Marion, who handles the association's marketing and member services, described the meeting on the same April webinar:
"We're going to have approximately 50 to 75 people in attendance, and we're keeping it at that size on purpose. We want to drive meaningful conversation, and I want to be clear, this isn't going to be the large trade shows that we've all become so accustomed to attending. It's not going to be people on a showroom floor trading inventory sheets with large boots. It's going to be the decision makers of our industry in one room, talking about some of the pain points that we're facing, talking about some of the upsides that we're seeing in the industry." ⁶
The framing is notable. A 50-to-75-person decision-maker meeting in Copenhagen, scheduled three weeks after the larger ITAD Europe summit in Nice, is not a trade show. It reads as a working session — the kind of gathering that would be appropriate for advancing institutional positions, coordinating regulatory responses, or refining standards specifications. Compare ITAD will be requesting press access to the meeting, and will report on the proceedings to the extent the association permits coverage.
What this means for the industry
The pattern of moves The ITAD Association has executed in recent months — the consolidation under the new branding, the documented OBADA DAO membership, the ongoing CIRPASS-2 Associated partner work that began in early 2024, and the Copenhagen working meeting in June — suggests an institution gradually building a more central role in how the industry organizes around verification, traceability, and regulatory compliance. The April webinar made the full posture publicly visible in a way it had not been before.
Whether the repositioning succeeds depends on factors The ITAD Association has only partial control over. The OBADA standard's commercial adoption rests on whether ITAD operators see economic value in writing their transaction data to an interoperable blockchain registry, and whether downstream buyers — OEMs, auditors, regulators — actually consume that data. The CIRPASS-2 work's value depends on the extent to which the consortium's output shapes the DPP's eventual deployment specifications for ITAD-relevant data. The standards-body claim depends on whether the industry's other certification bodies — SERI for R2v3, BAN for e-Stewards, i-SIGMA for NAID AAA — view The ITAD Association as a coordinating peer or as a competing claimant. The ISO 20435 standardization process for the OBADA Foundation's cryptographic proof framework will be a leading indicator of how seriously the broader standards ecosystem takes the work.
What is already true is that the institutional positioning has been built deliberately and over multiple years, and the trade press has not covered it. The CIRPASS-2 selection was announced more than two years ago. The OBADA DAO membership predates the rename. The Copenhagen working meeting is three weeks away. Industry developments at this scale rarely surface in dedicated coverage; the audience for the April webinar was in the low hundreds, and the consequential institutional implications have not been written about elsewhere in the way they are laid out here.
Compare ITAD will continue to track the rollout. The Copenhagen meeting is on the editorial calendar. The OBADA blockchain registry's progress on ISO 20435 standardization will be covered as substantive milestones are published. The CIRPASS-2 lighthouse pilot results, currently scheduled across the project's 2024-2027 runtime, will be reported as they become available.
Sources
¹ Joe Marion, President, ASCDI / The ITAD Association. Why Do You Need to Data Erase a Network Switch? Why is it so Difficult? ITAD Association Webinar Series, April 2026. Statement at 00:14 of the webinar recording. Recording publicly available on the ITAD Association's YouTube channel.
² Joe Marion, ASCDI / The ITAD Association. Same recording, statements at 00:21 (rename and EU incorporation), 01:38 (OBADA stewardship), and 02:04 (CIRPASS digital product passport) respectively. Note: the recording audio renders OBADA as "Obata" and CIRPASS as "Serpas"; both have been corrected against the relevant organizations' official documentation per Compare ITAD's Source Attribution Standard, published at /editorial-standards/source-attribution.
³ ASCDI / The ITAD Association corporate history: organization founded 1975 as the Association of Service and Computer Dealers International; merged with CDLA, DDA, ECLAT, and ITRA in 2000; absorbed NATD in 2012. Approximately 360+ member companies globally. Headquartered at 131 NW First Avenue, Delray Beach, FL 33444. Source: organization's own published history at ascdi.com/about-ascdinatd.
⁴ OBADA Foundation. Founded 2017. Open Blockchain for Asset Disposition Architecture. Operates the ITAD Blockchain — a decentralized registry linking physical assets to digital records via cryptographic tokenization keyed off serial numbers. Source: obadafoundation.org.
⁵ ISO 20435 — the OBADA Foundation's open international standard for cryptographic proof of proper data destruction and responsible recycling. Source: obadafoundation.org/standard/.
⁶ OBADA DAO Member List. ASCDI is the first-listed member, identified with Joe Marion as the contact, as of the January 2025 page update. Source: obadafoundation.org/dao/members, retrieved May 2026.
⁷ CIRPASS-2 (Digital Product Passports Enabling At-Scale and Real-Life Circular Economy Use Cases). Funded under the European Commission's Digital Europe Programme. Project runtime: May 2024 to April 2027. 49-partner consortium implementing 13 lighthouse pilots across textiles, electronics, tyres, and construction value chains. Sources: cirpass2.eu and Fraunhofer IZM project documentation at izm.fraunhofer.de.
⁸ ASCDI announcement of CIRPASS-2 Associated partner selection. Published February 22, 2024, by ASCDI / The ITAD Association. The announcement confirms ASCDI's role as an Associated partner in CIRPASS-2 and frames the contribution as bringing the association's "knowledge of the ITAD industry" and "involvement with the OBADA decentralized asset tracing project" to the European DPP work. Source: ascdi.com/ascdi-to-participate-in-the-cirpass-2-project.
⁹ Billy Marion, marketing and member services, ASCDI / The ITAD Association. Same April 2026 webinar recording, Copenhagen meeting announcement at 02:26.
Caroline Henley is Compare ITAD's editorial correspondent. Her byline covers regulatory developments, conference proceedings, policy analysis, M&A activity, and the broader currents shaping the IT asset disposition industry. Caroline is presented by Compare ITAD as an AI-rendered editorial voice; her work synthesizes published source material, public events, and editorial review by the Compare ITAD team. The full disclosure framework is published at /editorial-standards. The Source Attribution Standard governing this piece's citations is published at /editorial-standards/source-attribution.
Published in The ITAD Brief — Compare ITAD's editorial publication of record for the IT asset disposition industry. Read the rest of the publication at /brief.
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