The holiday season is slowly creeping up on us. As we do our holiday shopping while trying to tune out the catchy tunes while trying to pick out the best gifts, there should be another thing on your mind. What to do with all the old electronics you’ll likely replace with newly gifted ones by the end of the season. Many people immediately think to just toss or donate, but the most eco-friendly (not to mention wallet friendly!) option is to recycle!

We often upgrade or replace electronic devices, leading to a buildup of old gadgets. Properly recycling these devices not only helps protect the environment but also ensures you handle your e-waste responsibly. Whether you’re clearing out old smartphones, laptops, or other electronics, here’s a straightforward guide on the dos and don’ts of recycling your personal electronics.

Spread Community Awareness With E-Waste Recycling. Certified in Data Destruction and E-Waste Recycling, we're ready to assist your community in organizing an e-waste collection event. Contact us as we’d be happy to learn more and help with your plans to initiate an e-waste collection day

With how much of our daily lives occurs online, data security has become a top priority for organizations and businesses alike. The sheer amount of sensitive information stored on electronic devices calls for strict measures to protect this data from unauthorized access and misuse. One essential aspect of data security is data destruction. But why is data destruction important?

This year for Christmas, Santa will likely be kind enough to bring many of us new electronics of some sort. But what do you do with all of your old electronics now that you have shiny new ones? 

Data is the currency of your business, can help drive revenue, and can reduce costs and productivity. Every little bit contains a vast amount of personal data that you don’t want falling into the hands of the wrong people. Data doesn’t stop being valuable because it’s on a broken device or stored on a hard drive stacked in a box in the back corner of your server room. Even deleting the files isn’t going to get rid of the data completely. This is why proper data destruction is so important.

While your first inclination might be to hire a professional or a company to destroy data, you first have to have your in-house process buttoned up.

You need to know your end goals, what your company stores locally vs what is stored on your hard drives. Provided you have a staff, you also need to know what’s on their phones, laptops, desktops or tablets. What about customer or patient data? Also, if you regularly print, those files existed somewhere before.

While working from home can have its benefits and allow for a productive workday, there are also challenges that impact ITAD. For companies, it's important to pick an ITAD partner they can trust and can aid with services such as santizing devices, help you inventory excess or unnecessary devices, and help create a plan to dispose of them properly. It's an interesting time for everyone so having the right partner is key. 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, commonly known now as HIPAA, has provided patients with the privacy they need but it’s also been a challenge and disruption to the way medical records are maintained and managed from an IT perspective. Patient authorizations are required for any data sharing and breaches of HIPAA can have big financial applications to healthcare providers and networks. In fact, millions upon millions of dollars have been paid out in HIPAA-related breach of privacy cases. This extends to your ITAD practices as well. It’s key to have the right partner to help you navigate.

Virtually every company has the need to eliminate and recycle electronic waste. And while shredding unnecessary old or archived files is usually the answer, it isn’t always the right answer. It can shred your budget too. While on the surface shredding may seem like the simpler, cheaper alternative to wiping data, that’s simply not always the case. The machines can be cost-prohibitive and ultimately, more costly than wiping software. 

You spend on devices. You spend on hardware and software updates and upgrades. But how are you protecting your investment? ITAD (Information Technology Asset Disposition) is an important and sometimes overlooked means of ensuring that you have the means to recycle, refurbish and dispose of your old technology securely while maintaining your data security. And here’s a little more about why it’s so critical.

Proper data management is the key to protecting the security of your company’s sensitive information. In fact, companies are responsible for generating, storing, and securing sensitive data such as financial information, transactions, personally identifiable information, medical information, and more. In addition to the moral & logical responsibility of protecting this information, companies also have a legal obligation to keep sensitive data secure. 

Corporate Compliance regulations vary by industry, but they are crucial in developing your company’s risk management policy. One of the biggest risks of exposure for your company is through poor data destruction polices. Simply destroying IT assets or throwing them out with the trash is not an option, particularly if your organization deals with sensitive data. 

Technology has allowed many companies to work in the current COVID-19 climate while keeping their employees and families safe at home. Remote working is a flexible solution for many organizations because it allows employees to be online and in-network while they do not need to commute or expose themselves unnecessarily to others, however remote working does raise some questions about how a company’s IT Asset Disposition plan should work. 

Due to the hard work and advocacy by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), the Department of Homeland Security designated scrap yards such as Arrow Scrap as essential businesses on March 25, 2020.