Why should you recycle IT equipment?

As we all try to live more sustainably, it’s increasingly important that all businesses should be recycling IT equipment wherever possible.

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Businesses must follow strict

Waste Rules

The disposal of old IT equipment is covered by the Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment legislation.

This WEEE waste must not be sent to landfill as it can have PCBs, lead, mercury, and coolants which are dangerous to people and the environment.

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You reduce your landfill costs

Sending items to landfill is expensive with Landfill tax and gate fees to consider. So, anything which reduces the overall volume of waste you send to landfill helps reduce your overall business costs.

Your business becomes more sustainable

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Customers now look at how ecofriendly businesses are before they decide to make a purchase.

Businesses need to operate in this environment and be able to prove their credentials on sustainability.

Recycling your old IT equipment helps you do that. Some recycled equipment can also help charities here in the UK or projects in the developing world. You will be showing your commitment to your community or supporting communities abroad.

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You can protect your data

Recycling IT equipment also gives you the chance to ensure the data stored on hard drives is destroyed so that it cannot fall into the wrong hands and cause a data breach.

Shredding the drive, then mixing the metals with other shredded drives and sending that off for recycling is the best way to protect your business.

It also ensures your business is following the data protection rules in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Failure to do so can result in a large fine. u u Most people wrongly believe that deleting files from your desktop or laptop computers will mean they cannot be retrieved. That isn’t the case. The files are still on those devices somewhere. They’re just hidden from view. All you’ve done by deleting these items is removing the site map to find them. Data recovery software can find them, and the information contained in them. This information could fall into the hands of unscrupulous people who could use it to defraud or steal from your customers and employees or they could be out to ruin the reputation of your business. The financial cost could be large.

There are products like Safe Erase and Dban which will wipe your PC hard drive with one action. Anyone using the computer afterwards will have to install all their own software as a result.

On Macs with mechanical hard drives, you can put it into Recovery Mode then use Disk Utility – an application on all Macs – to wipe the hard drive. It can be trickier to wipe the hard drive on smartphones. A factory reset won’t wipe the drives on Android phones and tablets unless you encrypt the storage first, then erase it and restore the factory settings.

This is when a special program permanently wipes or erases a file. For one file, you’d tend to shred it –using a program which overwrites the contents with binary code. When you wipe an entire whole hard drive, that means you erase everything on it and anything you have removed previously. Don’t be fooled into thinking a factory reset or reformatting will do the trick. They tend to be the equivalent of removing files, rather than erasing them.

Yes – if you want your sensitive information to be dealt with securely, hire a company like Inspire Waste Management, with a long record of accomplishment in dealing with top companies and their confidential waste. Our expert staff understand our clients’ needs to be legally compliant and to deal with sensitive information in a secure way. n