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Photocopier Disposal Melbourne: We Pay You, and We Take It Away Free
ABC Copier Solutions buys commercial photocopiers, multifunction devices, production presses and wide-format plan printers from businesses across Melbourne and regional Victoria. We pay you for the machine rather than charging you to take it. Pickup is free, the price is agreed in writing first, and you are paid on collection.
- Free pickup anywhere in Melbourne and regional Victoria
- Firm price in writing before the truck is booked
- Paid on collection, not thirty days later
- Nothing we collect goes to landfill, which in Victoria is the law
What we buy
What we take in Melbourne, and what we don’t
We buy floor-standing commercial copiers and multifunction devices: the machines that sit on the floor or a cabinet, run on toner, and have paper drawers, a document feeder and usually a finisher. Canon imageRUNNER, Kyocera, Konica Minolta, Ricoh, Sharp, Toshiba, Xerox and Fuji Xerox, Develop. We also buy production presses, wide-format plan printers and plotters.
Two things decide whether we can buy it, and we would rather tell you now than waste an afternoon of your time.
- Ten years old or newer, any quantity. One machine is enough. There is no minimum.
- Or ten or more machines at once, any age. A fleet coming out of an office clear-out, a relocation, a school refresh or an end-of-lease return is worth collecting even when the individual machines are well past their best.
If your machine is older than ten years and it is the only one, it is usually past the point where we can pay you for it, and we would rather say so than string you along. Send it through anyway if you are not certain: the date on the sticker is not always the age of the machine, and we will come back to you either way.
What we cannot use at all is the desktop printer and the all-in-one: the machines that sit on a desk or a shelf and run on ink cartridges or an ink tank rather than toner. Brother MFC and DCP, Epson EcoTank and WorkForce, HP OfficeJet, DeskJet and Envy, Canon PIXMA. Paper size is not the test, whatever you may have read elsewhere: plenty of desktop inkjets print A3. The question is whether it stands on the floor and takes toner. If it sits on a desk and takes ink, your council transfer station or Officeworks will take it, and in Victoria they have to, because it cannot go in the bin.
Melbourne’s document load is broader than Sydney’s and spread further out. Professional, scientific and technical services make up 13.79% of all Melbourne businesses, health care another 7.86%, and financial and insurance services 5.53%. Those are the tenants along the Collins, Bourke and Queen Street financial strip, at Collins Square and Victoria Harbour in Docklands, on St Kilda Road and in Southbank, in the tech and creative offices at Cremorne, and out along the Monash corridor at Box Hill, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley, Clayton, Mulgrave and Notting Hill. Add the courts and law firms on William Street, the Spring Street and Treasury government precinct, the hospitals at Parkville, Prahran, Clayton, Heidelberg and Fitzroy, and 1,756 school campuses, more than any other city in the country. Those are the machines we collect here.
The law in Victoria
E-waste has been banned from Victorian landfill since 2019, and most businesses still do not know
Since 1 July 2019 it has been illegal to put e-waste into landfill anywhere in Victoria. The Victorian Government defines e-waste as any item with a plug, battery or power cord. A commercial photocopier has a plug, a processor, a hard drive and a power supply. It is covered, and it cannot go into a general waste skip.
The ban is not a household rule that businesses can ignore. EPA Victoria puts it plainly: landfills in Victoria are not able to receive e-waste. That applies to the load a strip-out crew tips at the transfer station just as much as it applies to your kerbside bin, and it is enforced under the Environment Protection Regulations 2021.
The cost side has moved too. The Victorian metropolitan landfill levy is $177.19 per tonne for 2026-27, up from $169.79 the year before. So even for the general rubbish that legally can go in the skip, the skip is getting dearer every July.
For a Melbourne facilities manager that has three practical consequences. An office strip-out crew quoting a flat volume price for everything on the floor is either sorting the e-waste out downstream, at their cost, or putting it in a load that cannot legally go where it is going, with your name on the paperwork. If you hold a government or council contract, sit inside a larger organisation’s ESG reporting, or answer to an ISO or client audit, you need to be able to show where the machine went. And a disposal route that leaves you with no record is a route you cannot evidence when someone asks.
That part we make easy. Every machine we buy is exported, stripped, and the parts recycled. None of it is recycled onshore, and none of it is sold whole to another business in Australia. Nothing we collect goes to landfill, which is the outcome the ban exists to produce. If you need the collection recorded for a procurement file, an audit or an environmental report, tell us at quote stage and we will put it in writing.
Your options, honestly
Trade-in, scrap, or sell it? What each option actually pays
In Victoria the tip was never an option, so the question is not where to take it. The question is that there are six or seven ways to make a 200kg machine go away and no obvious sense of which one leaves you best off. Here they are, including the ones that are not us.
- The leasing company takes it back at end of lease. You get nothing. Depending on the contract you may still be liable for condition, missing accessories or a make-good charge.
- The new supplier removes the old machine as part of the deal. That is free removal priced into the new contract. You are paying for it, just not on a separate invoice.
- A junk removal or office strip-out crew. Charged by volume. Fast, and it costs you money rather than making you any. In Victoria there is a second problem: the machine cannot legally go in the skip, so ask them where it is actually going before you sign the docket.
- A commercial e-waste recycler. You pay a fee and the machine is dismantled for its metal. This is the compliant route, and it still costs you.
- A scrap metal merchant. You might see $30 to $60 of metal, and you have to get 200kg of machine to a metal yard yourself, on your own transport, through tram streets and across two separate toll accounts.
- It stays in the storeroom for three years. The honest default, and on Collins Street or St Kilda Road that storeroom is not cheap floor space. Most machines we collect have been sitting somewhere for a while.
- Sell it to us. You get paid, pickup is free, and the machine does not come back into the Australian market to compete with the one you just bought.
| Route | Takes a 200kg MFD? | What it costs you | What you get back | Paperwork |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Leasing company takeback | Yes, at end of term | Possible make-good charge | Nothing | Lease closure only |
| New supplier trade-in | Yes | Priced into the new contract | Nothing separately | None |
| Junk removal / strip-out | Yes, but not legally to landfill | By volume | Nothing | Usually none |
| Commercial e-waste recycler | Yes | Per-unit or per-tonne fee | Nothing | Often a recycling receipt |
| Scrap metal merchant | You deliver it | Your own transport and tolls | Roughly $30–$60 of metal | Weighbridge docket |
| Leave it in the storeroom | Not applicable | CBD floor space | Nothing | Still on your asset register |
| ABC Copier Solutions | Yes, we bring the crew | Nothing. Pickup is free | We pay you, on collection | Written quote, collection and drive handling confirmed in writing on request |
Valuation
What your photocopier is worth, and how we work it out
There is no price list, because two identical machines can be worth very different money, and a press coming out of a Port Melbourne print room is a different conversation again. Nobody else in this category publishes a method at all. Here is ours, in the order it matters.
- Meter reading. The single biggest factor. We need the mono count and the colour count, which the machine will print for you from the counter menu. A C3070 at 400,000 clicks and the same machine at 4 million are not the same asset.
- Age and model. This is the factor that decides whether we can buy at all, not just what we pay. Current and previous generation machines hold real value. Once a machine is past ten years it is generally worth its parts and its metal rather than its function, which is why a single older unit usually is not one for us, but ten or more of them together still are.
- Consumable and component life. Fuser, drums, developer, transfer belt. A machine needing a full set costs the next owner thousands before it prints a page.
- Whether it powers on. It does not have to. It just changes the number. Tell us honestly and the quote will hold.
- Accessories and finishing. Booklet makers, saddle stitchers, large capacity trays, punch units, folders and spare toner all add value, sometimes more than the engine itself.
- Service history. A machine that has been on a maintenance contract is worth more than one that has not, and the service log tells us a lot in thirty seconds.
- Access. Melbourne has a wider spread here than people expect. A business park at Mulgrave with an at-grade dock costs us less to collect than a Collins Street tower that loads off Flinders Lane, with a tram stop out the front, a booked goods lift and a reserved parking permit, and the quote reflects it. We confirm access before we quote, never after.
What to send us for a same-day figure: the make and model, the meter reading, the rough age, whether it powers on, which floor it is on and which street the dock is on, and a photo of the machine and the control panel. That is enough for a real number rather than a range.
The price we give you is the price you get. It is agreed in writing before the truck is booked and it is not revised on the day.
Got a machine sitting in a Melbourne storeroom? Send us the make, model and meter reading and we will give you a figure today.
Call 0438 137 938Collection
How collection works, and where we come to in Victoria
Tell us what you have
Call Jaxon on 0438 137 938 or send the form. Make, model, meter reading, rough age, which floor it is on, and a photo if you have one.
Get a price in writing
A firm figure, same business day. Not a range, not an estimate revised on the day.
We book the collection
We arrange the truck, the trolleys, the tailgate lift and a two-person crew if the machine needs one. Dock access, lift bookings, parking permits and clearway windows confirmed before the day, not on it.
You get paid
Paid on collection. We decommission and load the machine; you do not have to do anything.
Melbourne is not the hardest city in the country to get a heavy machine out of, but it is the strangest, and the things that make it strange do not exist anywhere else we work. Trams run down the middle of nearly every major CBD street, which takes the centre lane away from a truck and puts a stop and a safety zone exactly where you would want to pull in. Most of the loading dock frontages for the older CBD stock are not on Collins or Bourke at all but on the little streets behind them: Flinders Lane, Little Collins, Little Bourke and Little Lonsdale, which are narrow, one-way and shared with every delivery van in the city. Reserving a bay outside a building means a City of Melbourne reserved parking permit, applied for ahead of the day. And clearways within roughly 20km of the CBD are tow-away zones, which turns a late collection into a lost truck.
Then there are two rules that catch out anyone who does not run trucks here. Victoria operates legislated no-truck zones through the inner west: Yarraville, Footscray and the streets around them are closed to heavy vehicles by law, not just by signage, so a machine coming out of Footscray, Yarraville or Seddon is collected on a route planned around that. And Melbourne has two separate toll operators, CityLink and EastLink, on two separate accounts, which is a small thing until a truck without the second account gets a bill in the post.
The counterintuitive one, which we would rather you heard from us: Cremorne and Collingwood look easy and are not. Low-rise, converted warehouses, no tower to deal with, and then narrow one-way streets, no loading docks and nowhere to stand a truck. The genuinely easy Melbourne sites are the ones that look industrial: the Monash corridor through Mulgrave, Clayton and Notting Hill, Tally Ho at Burwood East, Port Melbourne, and Dandenong South, all at-grade with a dock or a roller door a tailgate truck can back up to.
None of that is your problem. It is ours, and we price it in before we quote rather than discovering it on the day. It is also why we ask which floor the machine is on and what the street outside looks like before we give you a number.
We collect right across the metro: the Hoddle Grid, Docklands, Southbank and St Kilda Road; East Melbourne and the Spring Street precinct; Cremorne, Richmond, Collingwood and Abbotsford; Hawthorn East and Camberwell; the Monash corridor at Box Hill, Burwood East, Mount Waverley, Glen Waverley, Clayton, Mulgrave and Notting Hill; Port and South Melbourne; Essendon Fields and Tullamarine; the south-east through Moorabbin, Braeside, Cheltenham, Springvale and Dandenong; the north through Preston, Reservoir, Thomastown and Campbellfield; and the west through Sunshine, Braybrook, Tottenham, Laverton and Truganina. Regionally we run to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton, the Latrobe Valley, Wodonga, Mildura and Warrnambool.
Now the honest part about timing, because in this category the real fear is a no-show. We do not send a truck across the country to collect one machine. Melbourne collections are done by local crews based here in Victoria, coordinated from our Perth head office. That is the whole reason the paragraphs above read the way they do: the people loading your machine already know which little street the dock is on, which buildings want the lift booked a week out, and which roads through the inner west a truck cannot legally use. We agree a collection window with you when we quote, and we hold to it. If you have a fitout deadline, an end-of-lease date or a school holiday window, say so and we will work to it.
Where we collect in Victoria
Not on the list? We still come. Our crews cover all of Melbourne and regional Victoria.
The big machines
Production presses and wide-format machines: Melbourne is where they live
We buy production kit as well as office machines. Konica Minolta AccurioPress and bizhub PRO and PRESS, Xerox and Fuji Xerox Versant, Iridesse and PrimeLink, Ricoh Pro. If it ran a print room rather than a corridor, we are interested, and in Melbourne we are more interested than anywhere else.
Here is why. New South Wales has more printing businesses than Victoria, 1,468 against 1,104. But Victoria has more large ones: 64 printers with 20 to 199 staff, against 51 in NSW. Nearly six in every hundred Victorian print businesses are that size, against three and a half in NSW. Sydney is the volume market for small shops. Melbourne is the production press market, and the AccurioPress and Versant class machines we most want to buy are disproportionately sitting in Victorian print rooms.
They sit where Melbourne print has always sat. Port Melbourne and South Melbourne, the traditional belt. Clayton, Clayton South and Notting Hill. Braeside, Moorabbin, Mordialloc and Cheltenham through the south-east. Mulgrave and Springvale. Preston, Reservoir, Thomastown and Campbellfield in the north. Sunshine, Braybrook and Tottenham in the west. Add the print franchises that cycle A3 and light production kit on a lease schedule: Kwik Kopy, Minuteman Press, Snap and the independents. If you are in one of those postcodes and a press is coming out, our crews already know the street.
Production machines are valued differently from standard office machines. The click count still matters, but the engine hours, the finishing line and the condition of the fusing and imaging units matter more, and a press with a booklet maker, a stacker and a spare feeder can be worth several times the same press on its own. Send us the full configuration rather than just the model name.
De-installation is the other difference. A press is not a two-person trolley job. We arrange the rigging, the de-installation and the transport, and we confirm floor loading, lift capacity and dock access before we quote. If your machine is under a service contract, we can work alongside the dealer’s technician for the de-install rather than around them.
And a word for the shops going through it, because Victorian print is going through it. 134 Victorian printing businesses ceased trading in the 2024-25 financial year, roughly one in eight. Some closed, some merged, some moved into fewer and larger sites. When that happens the presses that do not make the trip still have to go somewhere, and the choice is usually between a clearance auction that takes a commission and a buyer who pays you directly and handles the de-install. We are the second one. If you are closing, consolidating or handing back a lease, call us before the auctioneer. If an administrator is already involved, have them call us: we will quote the presses the same way.
Data security
Hard drives, data, and what happens to your documents
Melbourne has a compliance culture around disposal that the other capitals are still catching up to, because the landfill ban forced the question seven years ago. The drive inside the machine is the half of that question most businesses have not asked yet.
Think about who owns these machines here. The William Street legal precinct is one of the most concentrated in the country: the Supreme Court, the County Court, the Magistrates’ Court and the Commonwealth Law Courts all sit within two blocks of each other, and the firms that appear in them sit around them. The Spring Street and Treasury precinct holds the state government. The Collins Street strip holds 307 finance firms in the 20 to 199 staff band. Parkville is a biomedical precinct with four hospitals, and health care is 7.86% of every business in the city. Those are organisations for whom a scanned file left on a copier hard drive is a breach, not an oversight.
The ban already means a compliant disposal in Victoria leaves a record of where the machine went. It costs nothing extra to make that record say what happened to the drive as well. Ask for both at the same time.
What happens to the data on the hard drive?
Every commercial photocopier made in the last fifteen years has a hard drive, and that drive holds images of what the machine has scanned, copied, emailed and faxed. Contracts, court documents, patient records, payroll, student files.
Tell us when you enquire and we will agree how the drive is handled before the truck is booked. We can remove it and leave it with you, wipe it, or destroy it, and we can provide written confirmation of what was done. If your organisation has an IT asset disposal policy, send it to us and we will work to it.
Questions
Photocopier disposal in Melbourne: common questions
Is it illegal to put a photocopier in landfill in Victoria?
Yes. E-waste has been banned from Victorian landfill since 1 July 2019, and the Victorian Government defines e-waste as any item with a plug, battery or power cord. A commercial photocopier is covered. EPA Victoria states that landfills in Victoria are not able to receive e-waste, and that applies to business waste as much as household waste, so it should not go into a general waste skip.
Who buys used photocopiers in Melbourne?
We do. ABC Copier Solutions buys floor-standing commercial copiers, production presses and wide-format machines from businesses across Melbourne and regional Victoria, pays on collection and collects free of charge.
How much does photocopier disposal cost in Melbourne?
With us it costs nothing, because we are buying the machine rather than disposing of it. Pickup is free and you are paid on the day. Councils, recyclers and junk removal crews generally charge, either per unit or by volume, and since the machine cannot legally go to landfill in Victoria, the cheap volume quote is usually not the whole story.
Can you collect from a Melbourne CBD tower?
Yes, and we plan for it rather than turning up and hoping. Most older CBD buildings load off the little streets rather than the main ones, trams take the centre lane on nearly every major street, and reserving a bay means a City of Melbourne reserved parking permit applied for ahead of the day. Tell us the building and the floor when you enquire and we will confirm dock access, lift booking and permit before we quote.
Will you buy my photocopier if it is more than ten years old?
On its own, usually not. A single machine past ten years is generally worth its metal rather than its function, and we would rather tell you that than take your details and go quiet. The exception is quantity: ten or more machines at once, we will buy at any age. So an old fleet coming out of an office clear-out, a relocation or a school refresh is absolutely worth a call, even though one of the same machines would not be. If you are unsure of the age, send the make, model and a photo and we will tell you either way.
Do you take whole office clear-outs and end-of-lease returns?
Yes, and they are the jobs we most want. Ten or more machines at once qualifies regardless of age, so a floor being stripped, a site consolidating or a lease handing back is a single call rather than a machine-by-machine assessment. Tell us the site, the rough count and your deadline and we will work to it.
My print shop is closing or consolidating. Will you buy the presses?
Yes. That is the job we most want in Victoria. We buy production presses and the finishing line with them, we pay you directly rather than through an auction commission, and we handle the rigging and the de-install. Send us the full configuration, the engine counts and your deadline. If an administrator is already involved, have them contact us and we will quote the same way.
My leasing company said they would take it back. Should I let them?
Check the contract first. End-of-lease takeback usually returns you nothing and can still leave you liable for condition or missing accessories. If the machine is owned outright rather than leased, selling it is almost always the better outcome.
Do you buy production printers and presses in Victoria?
Yes. AccurioPress, bizhub PRO and PRESS, Versant, Iridesse, PrimeLink and Ricoh Pro among others. Victoria has more large printing businesses than any other state and we buy across all of them. Send us the full configuration including the finishing line, because it changes the number significantly.
How long does collection take in Melbourne?
You get a firm price the same business day. Collection is handled by our local Victorian crews rather than a truck sent from interstate, so we agree a window with you when we quote rather than telling you after. If you have a fitout deadline, an end-of-lease date or a school holiday window, tell us and we will work to it.
Do you collect from regional Victoria?
Yes. Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Shepparton, the Latrobe Valley, Wodonga, Mildura and Warrnambool. Our crews cover regional Victoria as well as the metro, and there is no extra charge for regional pickup.
What happens to the hard drive?
Tell us when you enquire and we will agree how the drive is handled before the truck is booked. We can remove it and leave it with you, wipe it, or destroy it, and we can provide written confirmation of what was done. If your organisation has an IT asset disposal policy, send it to us and we will work to it.
Ready to have it gone? Send the make, model and meter reading and we will price it today. Free pickup anywhere in Victoria.
Call 0438 137 938