You sorta hint at this in your post, but I assume that eating the cost of the rare damaged-in-transit laptop is still cheaper than paying full price for all-new hardware.
And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.
Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.
If you look at it from the courier's side it makes more sense though.
It's obvious if an item was new and you can safely assume it was the delivery company that damaged it.
Whereas for secondhand items there's no way of knowing the original shipping condition. And it would open up massive amounts of fraud where people would buy a cheap broken item on eBay (sold for parts), ship it to a nearby friend with full insurance, and then claim the shipper broke it.
Insurance should still cover the case of an item lost in shipping however, regardless of new/secondhand, since there's no opportunity for fraud there.
And while I certainly understand that environmental impact might not be the chief concern for a company (even a non-profit), continuing to give secondhand hardware a new life is certainly way better for the environment.
Regardless, it seems bonkers to me that a courier can get away with such a clause. You're paying them to ship something safely from point A to point B; it should be completely irrelevant what that thing is when it comes to paying you out for their mistakes.