Corporate workplaces get through a fair amount of IT equipment, this is due to modernisation and finding new ways of working. Therefore, companies require ways of disposing of old equipment. It is quite a challenging task to fulfil all the demands of secure IT asset disposition and data protection. You cannot simply throw away IT assets and get away with them easily. It is important to get rid of old IT equipment properly if you want to protect your business from security threats.
Now the question is why do you need to dispose of your IT assets responsibly and safely?
There are two major reasons:
- First, it is your legal obligation to abide by the European WEEE directive for e-waste disposal. You can be fined if you failed to do so.
- To save your business from security threats like stolen or compromised data.
Secure IT Asset Disposition: What You Need To Know
Did you know?
An average computer that you use contains data and information equal to thousands of documents.
In addition, there are a lot of heavy metals and toxic substances in electronic equipment that can pollute our environment.
Throwing such items in the bin can put you at a major risk.
Therefore, today we will discuss some important facts you need to know before disposing IT assets.
1. Importance Of IT Asset Recycling & Disposition
Secure disposal of IT equipment provides you and your business with many benefits.
- By adopting a responsible IT asset disposition strategy, you won’t be adding more to the global crisis of e-waste management.
- It gives you complete confidence that you are handling your old IT assets according to the European WEEE directive. Moreover, it does not subject you to fine for any negligence.
- If you are sending, your electronic equipment for IT recycling then it provides you with a vendor that values your security.
- You can protect your data and personal information from being stolen by disposing of them safely.
- Recycling IT assets also saves the cost of destruction and are the source of precious metals like gold, iron and copper.
However, if you are not considering IT asset recycling then you are making yourself vulnerable to many risks. Also, you will have to face the following consequences.
2. Security Risk And Data Theft
There is a major difference between secure IT asset disposal and free recycling. If you are using the services of companies that offer free recycling then be ready to receive a bundle of junk emails from around the world.
Your used IT equipment, which includes laptops, hard drives, computers and laptops, gets shipped to the third world countries.
If you have not removed your data from the devices then your security is at risk. Moreover, it can become a serious problem for any business organisation because data cleansing and destruction is their responsibility.
Safe IT asset disposition constitutes complete cleansing of your devices and makes data retrieval impossible. However, it is your responsibility as well to ensure that all the sensitive data has been removed from the devices before sending it anywhere for recycling.
3. Wastage Of Rare Minerals
IT waste is a hidden resource of many rare minerals and metals. By dumping your IT assets, you are only wasting such minerals.
Did you know?
A mobile phone and a laptop contain almost 15 types of minerals and rare metals.
Keeping in mind the dangers of mining, recycling IT assets can be a useful resource of minerals.
Therefore, wasting such minerals by discarding your mobile phones is not a virtue of a responsible citizen.
Free recycling companies generally dump old IT equipment in the landfills polluting the land.
However, IT asset recycling companies ensure that no recyclable part of such equipment ends up in the landfill.
4. Dangers Of Flammable Batteries
As you all know electronic and IT waste consists of various types of batteries as well. One of them is lithium batteries.
Even though lithium batteries store a lot of energy but they can put you in a lot of trouble as well.
Want to know how?
Let us teach you how lithium batteries can be dangerous for you to handle.
When a battery is degraded, the lithium inside it gets exposed which is highly reactive with oxygen and water. This reaction can result in the following actions:
- An intense fire. Statistics show that approximately 128 such fires have been reported between 2017-2018.
- Discharge of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
- Pollution of groundwater
All of these dangerous incidents can occur because of careless handling of batteries. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the safe disposal of lithium batteries. It is only possible through secure IT asset disposition. For this purpose, you can employ the services of authorised IT recycling companies.
Read this article on How To Dispose Of Laptop Battery. Everything You Need To Know Is Right Here.
5. Secure IT Asset Disposition Services
The best and the most efficient way of getting rid of your old tech stuff is by utilising the services of IT asset disposition companies.
Many IT disposition and recycling companies are working nowadays that are committed to safely disposing of your IT equipment. They are WEEE authorised carriers of IT assets and guarantee safe disposal of toxic substances found in the batteries or other IT assets.
Moreover, they offer secure data destruction or sanitisation for large business organisations who are in search of credible asset disposition services.
Such services work by
- Using leading data security platforms, which make complete cleansing of devices possible.
- They also shred the hard-drives to remove the data permanently.
- Their mission is to achieve a 0% landfill rate and safely recycle all the IT assets without polluting the land.
- In addition to this, they also allow you to remarket your old IT equipment.
- They also provide you with the facility to track your assets at every stage of the disposal.
We hope that now you understand the importance of secure IT equipment disposal. Even though many IT recycling companies are operating in the UK but Eco Green IT Recycling is the leading IT asset disposition company. Their management tries to maintain the highest level of professionalism. Their extraordinary and best quality services set them apart from the rest of the e-waste recycling companies.
The post 5 Things You Need To Know About Safe IT Asset Disposition appeared first on Eco Green.