About Regrove
Regrove is a student-led project that collects unwanted electronics, refurbishes what can be saved, and passes it on to older adults and students who need a device. Everything else goes to a certified recycler. We publish what we collect and where it goes.
Why we started
We’re still writing this one properly.
There is a specific moment this project started — a drawer, a dead laptop, someone deciding it was worth doing something about. That’s the paragraph that belongs here, and it’s worth getting right rather than replacing with a mission statement in the meantime.
Until it’s written, what we do is on this page already: the commitments below are the part that doesn’t need a story to be true.
The team
We’re putting real names and faces to this.
Regrove is student-run, and the people running it will be listed here — first name, school, and what each of them actually does on a Saturday morning — with photographs of the real bench and the real volunteers.
We’d rather leave this space empty for a few weeks than fill it with stock photography of people who have never touched a laptop of ours.
Our partners
Our first partnerships are still being confirmed.
Three kinds go here once they’re signed: the certified recycler that takes what we can’t save, the schools and senior centres that devices go out to, and the libraries hosting our collection points. Each will be named, and the recycler will be linked to its certification so you can check it.
None are listed yet because naming an organisation that hasn’t agreed to it would be a claim about them, not about us. What we will and won’t sign
Our commitments
Five promises. Each one links to the page where you can check whether we’re keeping it.
We publish our numbers.
Everything collected, refurbished, placed and recycled is on the impact page, read live out of our records — including the months where the number is small.
See the numbersWe never export hazardous waste.
What we can't refurbish goes to a certified recycler, and we check the certification in the R2 or e-Stewards directory rather than taking a logo on a website for it.
How we checkWe wipe every drive.
Sanitised to NIST SP 800-88 Rev. 1 Purge, or physically destroyed if it can't be wiped. Business donors get it in writing, device by device.
What happens to your dataWe say no to what we can't handle.
CRT monitors, appliances, smoke detectors and swollen batteries. Saying yes and then quietly landfilling something would be worse than turning it away.
What we acceptWe tell donors where their device went.
Ask when you donate and we'll write to you once yours has been processed, with what happened to it.
Donate a device
Our status
TODO — legal status not stated anywhere
docs/CONTENT.md: state plainly “whether you’re a registered nonprofit, under a fiscal sponsor, or neither”. Nothing in docs/ says which, and docs/SPEC.md forbids claiming tax-deductibility the project doesn’t have — so this is the one section on the site where a guess could cause a donor a real problem. State the true answer, including if the answer is “neither, and donations are not tax-deductible”.