The hard drives are most likely being shredded since that is a common practice and certification feature offered by most disposal companies.
The servers are being "destroyed" because thats how they will be accounted for in inventory and tax purposes to account for full depreciation. The company isn't "selling" the servers to the disposal company so they are marked as "destroyed."
Unless specified in the contract the disposal company will sell the chassis without the drives to a reseller or if they are being paid to dispose of the system, they will separate the components and recycle the metal.
The same goes for the power and network cables, they will go off to a recycler, its how disposal companies off-set their pricing.
The whole situation so ridiculous and bureaucratic
Happy to say that my company shreds its old hard drives, then puts new ones in the old laptops and desktops and spruces them up for reuse.
We team up with a local organization to give them to poor children and families each Christmas. IT always sends around a bunch of photos afterward of kids who don't always know where they'll sleep from night to night clinging to a used computer like it's a life ring and they're in the middle of the ocean. I've been told that for some of them, it's the only present they'll receive the entire year.
We don't qualify for a tax break or any other renumeration for this. We do it because it's a nice thing to do.
(I have no idea what happens to servers. Not my department.)
What happens with the shredded material? Is it recycled? Sent to heavy industries?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
Stack Overflow used to serve over half a billion page views per month on only 25 servers[0]. I wonder how much traffic they get now, excluding crawlers?
Anecdotally, one of the reasons for SO's decline is that an LLM gives you the SO answer without the condescending snark. SO could have fixed that years ago, but didn't. So perhaps it might turn out to be yet another example of the dictum that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
[0] https://highscalability.com/stackoverflow-update-560m-pagevi...
Lets use some logic here. The disposal company is taking the cables with them to recycle them for the copper wire. Same with power cables.
Anyone who has posted "free" things online knows it comes a cost, thats the logic part I was referring too. When you work through the scenarios the "logical" conclusion is to give them to the recycler that you already have out at the datacenter for the systems you are decommissioning.
(Put them in a box that says "free" in the lobby of the NY office then throw what hasn't been taken a month later)