COMPUTERS and IT equipment have become commonplace in offices and workplaces over the past few decades.

Technology is ever changing and developing, and was new today and can obsolete or outgrown quickly.  But when shiny new kit is unpacked, what happens to the old, grubbed, run down and worn out?

It can’t just be thrown in a bin or in a skip.  Since January 2007 Organisations have been bound by the The Waste Electronic & Electrical Equipment Directive (WEEE), which decrees anything using a flowing electric current to function (e.g. all computers and IT related equipment) must be recycled with organisations having a legal duty of care to ensure such recycling is carried out in accordance with the standards laid out by the WEE Directive.

Personal/confidential data needs to be safeguarded along with that of commercial value to business rivals or connected with national security.  All such data has to be erased to standards set out by the UK Government, MOD and The CSEG (The National Technical Authority for Information Assurance), which cover software wiping, degaussing and shredding.

There are a number of companies offering IT and Data Recycling services.  Some can buy used items to both resell them and ensure security issues are dealt with and the items themselves can be traced if needed.

Items will be picked up by uniformed staff who will take care of items from loading and transit through to final delivery, creating a complete audit trail in the process.

The most crucial item of hardware are hard drives of all types desktop, laptop, SCSI, SATA, IDE, etc.
Next are magnetic tapes and disks for offline storage, which can include various formats including: Dat, DLT, video and CCTV and Video tapes.  Also covered are floppy disks, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, HD disks and Blue Ray.

Many firms also shred old mobile phones, PDA’s, Blackberrys etc.