The Compare ITAD Verification Standard
What “verified” means here.
The checkmark means we checked. What we could confirm is in the report — including when it is less than the vendor claims.
Version 1.1 · Effective September 2026
Three states
Not every vendor here is verified.
A vendor is in exactly one of these states, and the profile always says which.
Listed
Free · automaticCompiled from public sources. Credentials are shown as grey “self-reported” pills. No vendor participation, and no opt-out — a vendor cannot remove themselves from the directory to avoid scrutiny.
Registry-Verified
Free · automatic · permanentEach credential cross-checked against the issuing authority’s public registry: SERI’s R2 Certified Facility Registry, BAN’s e-Stewards Certified Recycler Directory, i-SIGMA’s NAID AAA Member Directory, and the named accrediting body for ISO. A green checkmark per credential, with a source link and the date checked.
This is what powers the directory today, it requires nothing from the vendor, and it stays free permanently.
Compare ITAD Verified
Paid · opt-inThe shield. Available only to vendors already in the directory — if we could not find a vendor in any licensing or certification record, they cannot apply.
Apply for verificationThe paid review
Every eligible vendor who applies gets verified.
What varies is what the report says.
Base verification confirms what is verifiable for any legitimate operator: the entity exists, holds a current licence to operate as an ITAD vendor in the states claimed, and is recognised as valid there. Specializations are earned on evidence and are not granted without it.
The review covers what public registries cannot show:
- —Licence and registration status confirmed against the issuing state authority
- —Certificate documents obtained directly and checked against issuer records
- —Scope verification — which facility, which processes, which data-destruction methods the certification actually covers, rather than a company-level yes/no
- —Regulatory and enforcement history: state environmental agencies, EPA actions, court records, consent decrees
- —Business standing: entity status, ownership, years operating
- —Insurance certificates against the coverage minimums in the vendor agreement
- —Facility confirmation: each processing location, owned versus subcontracted
- —Certification expiry monitoring for the full term, with renewal follow-up
The three tiers
What each badge asserts.
| Tier | What it asserts |
|---|---|
| Verified — Base | The vendor exists, is licensed to operate as an ITAD vendor in the states claimed, and is recognised as valid there. They can lawfully dispose of equipment. |
| Verified — Regulated Industries (RI) | Additionally holds the documented certifications and controls required for regulated-industry work — healthcare, financial services, government. |
| Verified — Critical Infrastructure (CI) | Additionally holds the documented certifications and controls required for critical-infrastructure environments. |
A vendor who applies claiming RI or CI and cannot produce the evidence receives Base. That is not a failure of the process; it is the process working, and the report says exactly what could and could not be confirmed.
A hard rule
The badge always renders its tier.
Never a bare “✓ Verified.” If every paying vendor carries a checkmark, the checkmark alone carries almost no information — the information lives in the tier. A buyer scanning results who sees the same mark on a Base vendor and a CI vendor is misled by omission even though the underlying report is honest.
Rendered this way everywhere the badge appears: profile pages, directory results, comparison tables, bid surfaces, marketplace listings, and any embed.
The same rule, applied to certifications
A credential states what it assures, not only that it exists.
A bare checkmark on a certification misleads in the same way a bare checkmark on a vendor does. Scope verification is already part of the review; this is what the answer looks like when it is written out.
R2v3 Appendix B certifies to Clear, not to Purge.
R2v3 Appendix B(13) requires sampling sufficient to demonstrate that data is “not recoverable by commercial software”. SERI’s own guidance places commercial software “at a level between basic visual inspection for data and forensic laboratory analysis”. That is the Clear threshold. Purge, in both NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 (September 2025) and IEEE 2883-2022, is defined against state-of-the-art laboratory techniques.
Appendix B(11)(a) scopes the requirement to user-addressable locations. On solid-state media that does not reach overprovisioned blocks, metadata, cache, or unallocated NVM — and NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 2 §4.5.2 names exactly that gap as a validation red flag.
R2v3 Appendix B does not, by its own stated assurance level, guarantee an SP 800-88 Purge or an IEEE 2883 Purge. A buyer who needs Purge-level assurance must specify it contractually in addition to R2v3 certification.
Every standard we cite carries its revision.
NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 was withdrawn on 26 September 2025 and superseded in its entirety by Rev. 2. A policy, contract, or vendor answer that cites “NIST 800-88” without a revision is citing two documents that no longer say the same thing: Rev. 2 §4.5.1 states that elaborate sampling after a clear or purge “is not necessary” unless organizational policy requires it, and its Appendix D change log records that almost all verification language was removed. Per-asset evidence is still worth requiring — but it is the buyer’s requirement, not NIST’s, and has to be asked for as one.
None of this is a mark against a certified vendor. Appendix B certifies what it says it certifies, and a vendor who holds it has been audited against it. The failure is a buyer who reads it as an assurance it was never written to give.
The fee
You pay for the check, not the answer.
The founding cohort is verified at no cost.
Compare ITAD Verification is a paid service, and pricing will be published here when the paid tier opens. It has not opened yet. The initial cohort is reviewed at no charge, in exchange for being named as founding verified vendors and for permission to publish the process — the review itself, the evidence we asked for, and what we found. Paying nothing does not buy a result: the standard applied to the founding cohort is the standard on this page, and their reports are published like any other.
When the paid tier opens, a single annual fee will cover the review, the report, and monitoring for the term. Because every eligible vendor receives a result, there is no refund question — the vendor pays for a check and receives a check, and the report says what it says.
Two edge cases where a fee is retained without a badge being issued. Both will be stated in the application flow before payment:
- —The vendor is not in the directory. They cannot apply, and no fee is taken.
- —A claimed licence turns out to be invalid, lapsed, or nonexistent, or the vendor misrepresented a material fact. The review was performed, so the fee is retained, and no badge issues until the underlying problem is fixed.
We do not use a refund-on-rejection model. If we only kept money from approvals, we would be financially motivated to approve. Charging for the work regardless of the answer removes that incentive entirely.
What makes that real
Three commitments, not slogans.
We will publish the distribution of verification tiers once the first cohort is complete. Of verified vendors, how many hold Base only, how many RI, how many CI. This is the honest analogue of a pass rate and it is more useful to a buyer — if nearly everyone is Base, that is a finding about the industry, and it is exactly the finding that makes this directory worth reading.
No specialization without evidence. A vendor cannot pay to be RI or CI. They can remediate — obtain the certification, resolve the enforcement action — and be re-reviewed.
The report is available to the buyer, not just to the vendor. A badge whose underlying reasoning is private is a sticker.
Lifecycle
What happens when something lapses.
Re-verification. The shield is reviewed annually. When a certification lapses, the vendor enters a 60-day renewal-pending window. If it is not resolved in that window, the shield is paused and deal routing is suspended. The profile stays published — removing it would hide the finding from exactly the buyer who needs it.
Misrepresentation. A vendor who misrepresents a material fact permanently loses the shield, and we publish a correction.
Version 1.1 — change log
This standard is versioned. Material changes increment the version number; editorial corrections do not.
- 1.1 · September 2026
- Adds the assurance-level rule: a certification claim states what it assures, not only that it exists. Records that R2v3 Appendix B certifies to the Clear threshold rather than to Purge, and that every standard cited on this site carries its revision — NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 having been withdrawn on 26 September 2025.
- 1.0 · August 2026
- First published. Establishes the three vendor states, the three verification tiers, the tier-rendering rule for badges, and the fee model.