Has your corporate-issued IT equipment – smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop PCs – reached the end of their productive lives? Is your data center in need of upgraded servers, storage, or network devices, but you wonder how to safely and economically discard existing data-filled gear?
As the tech industry observes this year’s E-Waste Day (October 14), Blancco, the world’s largest data sanitization software company, has some ideas about how companies can responsibly dispose of aging, insecure, or outdated IT gear – including possibly reaping some economic or even moral profit from it.
This year’s E-Waste Day focus is CRMs (critical raw materials), apropos considering CRMs have become the focal point in the recent trade impasse between the U.S. and China. CRMs continue to be an environmental issue, but the area is widening into an even more divisive eco- and geopolitical fissure, as CRMs are crucial not only for fostering the green and digital transition but also for being mined in only a handful of countries.
“[CRMs are] sure as heck becoming more important,” explains Maurice Uenuma, VP & GM Americas at Blancco Technology Group, especially “as soon as [China] start[s] choking off the supply, or China decides to take over Taiwan here in a few years. And Taiwan is a major source of CRMs, so that’s actually a national security interest, part of a broad national, economic, and industry strategy to reduce the risk of over-reliance on one country or one supplier. Certainly, recovering existing CRMs is absolutely a huge part of that.”
Earn For ESG, CRMs
While responsibly disposing of old enterprise devices sounds like the right thing to do, companies often measure the right thing to do against adverse economic impacts. Thankfully, it turns out that following ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) equipment disposal criteria can be not only cost-effective but potentially profitable.
According to a third-party survey of roughly 2,000 enterprise organizations with 5,000 or more employees, IT and sustainability leaders from around the globe and sponsored by Blancco, up to half of all end-of-life assets – smartphones, tablets, PCs, and data center assets – are destroyed. Yet, according to the final survey report, “a significant share of these devices – up to 47% for data center assets – were still operational at the time of destruction. That’s wasted value, wasted resources, and wasted ESG potential.”
More practically, the report stated that “[d]estroying functional devices costs large enterprises over $1 million every three years,” in addition to another $1.1 million in lost resale value.
Many consumer technology companies, including retailers, aren’t exactly “large enterprises,” but Blancco still sees ESG disposal value in even a small organization’s aging or obsolete devices.
“Smaller companies all have the same concerns and issues that large enterprises do, just at a smaller scale,” Uenuma insists. “So to the extent that they can be more aware of how to responsibly handle end-of-life data-bearing assets and the potential for recovering value, the better.”
Safe Disposal
Not losing money on disposing of old equipment while also following sustainable ESG criteria and recovering CRMs are all admirable goals. But how does a company accomplish these goals while making sure the data on devices to be disposed of doesn’t fall into the wrong hands? Two words: data sanitization.
“Blancco provides the software platform that enables the secure erasure of data from data-bearing assets,” reports Uenuma. “Those assets include everything from data center hardware like servers and storage units to end-user compute devices like laptops and tablets to mobile devices.
Blancco, founded in 1997, works mostly with the growing number of ITADs (IT Asset Disposition) companies such as SK Tes, Iron Mountain, Sage, Illumynt, and even Ingram Micro. ITADs are essentially a middleman with whom companies contract to safely take old gear off their hands for destruction or refurbishing for resale.
As an industry, ITADs have several e-waste certification bodies: NAID (National Association of Information Destruction), now part of iSIGMA (International Secure Information Governance & Management Association), e-Stewards, and the ANSI-accredited R2 (Responsible Recycling) certification, now in version 3 (R2v3), administered by the non-profit SERI (Sustainable Electronics Recycling International).
Blancco supplies the data sanitization for many certified ITADs.
“We perform asset lifecycle-related tasks like diagnosing the condition of assets, which is important for our customers who have to make a decision about what to do with the asset – whether to get rid of it or try to resell it,” Uenuma continues. “If it’s reselling it, we help them estimate the type of residual value that’s in that device. We also help enable asset reimaging, which is important, typically in the process by which these devices can transition to their second life, if you will.”
Blancco supplies the data sanitization software directly to the enterprise to sanitize devices before they’re delivered to an ITAD, or, more usually, to an ITAD, which performs the sanitization before destruction or other device disposition. Sometimes data sanitization is performed by both the enterprise and ITAD for belt-and-suspenders data sanitization assurance, since there have been instances where unsanitized devices have been physically hijacked and hacked during their transfer from an enterprise to an ITAD.
Second Life Options
For enterprises and smaller companies, that aforementioned “significant share” of still operational but soon to be disposed of IT devices can be given a second or even third life.
Enterprises have the option of data sanitizing their devices and reselling the equipment themselves to recoup their own outlay. Far more frequently, however, companies rely on ITADs to resell sanitized and refurbished gear to other companies or third-party used device sellers who then resell to consumers – or even through their own online stores.
“The end consumers should know that whether it’s an e-commerce platform like eBay or an ITAD that is taking enterprise equipment and erasing it and preparing it for resale that there is a mature process by which they can tap into to buy high quality laptops, tablets, and smartphones that are ready for use,” Uenuma notes, “and they should have confidence in the quality of it in the data security and privacy behind it.”
More morally munificent and potentially tax beneficial for companies, however, is donating equipment to schools or other charities and non-profits. There are even ITAD companies that focus particularly on circulating certified, sanitized devices to non-profits such as the Houston-based Compudopt, which currently serves 57 cities in 22 states with five physical locations to provide computers as well as technical, digital literacy skills, and high-speed internet connectivity to children. In 2023, Compudopt recycled 167,302 pounds of used electronics and reused 182,000 pounds.
“We have nonprofit charity customers that range from larger ones [from] Goodwills to small local shops to online platforms like Cell Phones For Soldiers,” Uenuma says. “Instead of collecting cash, the enterprise that’s offloading will just donate it, and it becomes, speaking for their accounting department, a good thing.”
See also: Executive Insight: The Sustainability Shift – A New Age In Consumer Tech Preferences
