There can be a range of confusing choices when the time comes to get rid of your company’s e-waste. E-waste includes items like mobile phones, laptops and even printers and fax machines. You can resell these products, take them to a local recycling depot, re purpose them or destroy them, but which choice is best?

The truth is that every other option besides complete destruction can place your company’s data at serious risk. Believe it or not, data these days can exist everywhere. Printers and fax machines come complete with their own space for data storage. This does make for far easier printing and faxing, as particular projects or phone numbers can be called up with the push of a button. However, once these products have reached the end of their useful life, those projects and numbers can do a lot of damage should they end up in the wrong hands.

Consider Your Company’s Practices

Did you know that each year, around 50 million tonnes of e-waste is disposed of around the world. Although an exact statistic is not available, we’re sure the volume of IT assets improperly disposed of would shock you. Your IT assets consist of several parts which can all be recycled sustainably or otherwise destroyed. Simply casting them into the rubbish bin or using a so called ‘free’ IT recycling service means they will probably end up in landfill somewhere in the world. This is not an ideal scenario for a few reasons.

First, our country’s landfills are filling up quickly. Second, there are many companies out there, including Absolute IT, who are experts in IT asset disposal, making it unnecessary to dispose of your e-waste with other rubbish. Third, these items can contain a number of chemicals that are harmful to the environment. Left to rot in a landfill, these chemicals can end up leaching slowly from items over an untold number of years, causing real damage to the flora and fauna, and ultimately, human health if they get into the drinking water supply.

As a manager, you need to take a look at your company’s asset disposal practices to ensure that the following are being consistently met.

Taking Your Time

Your disposal practice needs to include plenty of time for the process to occur. It’s important to really think about each asset and determine whether it may be useful in another department. Calling a company like Absolute IT to wipe or dispose of your assets is key. One of our services is data erasure. This can be ideal in situations where you’ve determined your assets can be used in another department. All data is completely wiped from the hard drive and a certificate given to you to guarantee this.

Knowing Where Everything is Going

You likely have a number of assets waiting to be categorised for reuse, resale or disposal. If this is true, you need a way to be able to track where each item will end up. For example, there are many free services that will pick up your items and get rid of them for you. But will they end up in a secure facility, or in another country where regulations may not be as strict?

Absolute IT ensures that your assets are not only securely disposed of, but provides you with a record of what was done, when it was completed, and where it is going. This provides you with the peace of mind and security of knowing that your items and the data they contained remain secure until wiping or destruction.

Services You Can Trust

Absolute IT can help you decide where all of your company’s IT assets should go. Whether you need to wipe your data, physically destroy your items or maintain your chain of custody, our team of experts has the knowledge you need to ensure the security of all of your company’s sensitive equipment.