IT / PC Disposal - WEEE Regulations

The world of “red tape” which we live in can be a nightmare, but legislation regarding proper disposal of office equipment may help to save your company from financial losses incurred through identity theft, or theft of company and clients confidential information.

You have a number of options when considering what to do with old or redundant IT equipment, you can:

• Recycle IT Equipment and Upgrade for Re-Use within your Company
• Resell Redundant Equipment to Employees.
• Resell or Gift Redundant Equipment to other Organizations and Charities.
• Destroy the Equipment – which leads to Environment Agency for the Controlled Waste Regulations 1991 to be considered.

The Data Protection Act, corporate governance regulations, software piracy & Copyright legislation breaches all incur heavy fines.

The lengthy and costly litigation process involved with those breaches is another item for consideration when you need to dispose of redundant IT equipment.

WEEE Directive [Effective 2^nd January 2007]

The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE Directive) aims to minimise the impact of electrical and electronic goods on the environment, by increasing re-use and recycling and reducing the amount of WEEE going to landfill. 

Courts can issue unlimited fines and individuals can be criminally prosecuted
The business user will be held accountable if WEEE is not managed correctly
The Environment Agency and DEFRA will pursue the person who last used the equipment not just the person who carried out any illegal dumping.
The government's approach has been that business users will know what to do when it comes to compliance i.e. organisations should know how to interpret the regulations and therefore do whatever is right.

Specifically, the WEEE directive requires 65 per cent of end-of-life IT equipment to be recycled and another 10 per cent to be recovered.

Clearly it to everyone’s advantage to ensure that equipment and information that is still sitting on hard drives [even after formatting] is dealt with in a secure and safe manner.

With choices to upgrade or refurbish your equipment we can help but we are mindful of the need to protect the environment and avoid the complex legal minefield that has grown up around information technology equipment disposal.

So you want to “clean up your disc”, delete or erase everything, the dictionary definitions include:

1. To cross out or erase. 2. To cancel

1. To remove; rub, wipe, scrape or blot out 2. To remove [information] from a computer memory. 3. To destroy all of traces of.

What you need is to DELETE DATA i.e. Remove and make irrecoverable  all sensitive information.

Unfortunately when you say delete on your computer the data still will stay on the drive but is simply not easily visible to you.

With specialist software to MOD Standards we can permanently delete all information by overwriting the data on the hard drive – never to be recovered. Software that has been audited by CESG as compliant with Infosec Memo No. 7 and the MOD standard for Data Erasure.

A Data Erasure Certificate can be produced from this process, in the event a system has been wiped of information the Data Protection Act requires the IT Administrator holds one of these. We are not currently [June 2007] aware of any other product that has both MOD clearance and certification capabilities.