How To Dispose of Hard Drives In The UK

If you have a hard drive that needs recycling, you may be wondering where to dispose of it. Here are the best places to get your hard drive recycling done in the UK. The best way to dispose of hard drives – and destroy digital data that is no longer needed – is to have them physically destroyed by a professional document destruction company. This is the most effective and risk-free way to ensure information is permanently destroyed. 

Domestic Hard Drive Disposal

That directive makes computers using digital storage media or a hard drive that store electronic data a type of appliance (Article 22). Accessories to hard drives, such as memory, are not covered by this definition. So you’ll have to destroy your hard drive yourself by filing it, shredding it, or obliterating it. The major shredding companies with offices in the UK are Filer’s, Falcon, Datacart and Bridgepoint. Hard drives will be sent to Billetone International for destruction and certified by their staff to be destroyed only on the client’s premises. They use anti-theft measures and a full IT security track to ensure the safety of the staff destroying the hard drive. 

Just because people may think that destroys to throw away is allowed doesn’t mean that you should. In most cases, whoever disposed of the device will claim the rubbish as rubbish and send it away by air freight to landfill unless a contract exists between the agent and the client. Hard drives that are sent to landfill should be certified by government authorities as hazardous or hazardous material. If those criteria are not met upon taking them out of the country, they should be sent back to the original sender where they can be properly disposed of. If you replace a personal computer with an accessory to your hard drive, the original terms of service between you and the original retailer apply. Hard drives in the UK that are certified as hazardous material or otherwise end-of-life are accepted at our dumpsite for recycling and may be reused for specified purposes by choosing to have them filled with dry matter and shredded for paper. 

Whether it’s your laptop, drive or hard drive, protect those files with encryption. Encryption prevents someone else from reading the data without your being aware that it has been accessed. Linux supports 256-bit encryption with a keypair that only you have access to and the link encryption option guarantees additional security. Most GPT-based operating systems can be configured to use 128-bit encryption which provides more security if you use software built into the OS or with a password manager. Treat step-by-step how to set up encryption with a password manager and create strong passwords for added protection. Windows has strong built-in encryption options which you can activate at any time or in Settings > Accounts > Turn on PC encryption. On Mac OS, go to your Account Settings and then to File System Encryption > Security.

How to Dispose of Old Computers UK

All data stored on hard drives is the property of the person or organisation that owns it. Legally, this means that employers have the right to access and generally modify employee data, as long as the modifications are for a bona fide business purpose you will be notified of and have the required permissions. While your hard drive should be destroyed as in any other shredding job, it’s important to mention interpreting the law: it is generally illegal to hack, decrypt or otherwise gain access to employee data. Additionally, employees can unfairly be fired for lawfully accessing employee data there may be a valid business reason for. I

If  you have any encrypted data on your hard drive, you should protect it by removing the encryption keys before destroying your hard drive. If you don’t have a shredding partner, several online options exist. Bridgerton shredding is a reputable and cost-effective service for securely deleting hard drives. They shred old hard drives and provide storage space where customers can securely store files that may be sent to more permanent storage locations once the drive runs out on their site. 

Bridgerton can also shred old Apple accounts, keep copies of social media accounts in order to identify people who may re-offend, store digital copies of footage or information that is being deleted — they also have a mobile app for this purpose. Bridgerton shredding also offers a cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternative to e-waste recyclers in most cities. All of their shredding is ‘in-house or outsourced’ meaning they do not require a shredding contract in order to work with you. Blowfish is a leading corporate shredding service. They are most readily known for their corporate clientele including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, EBay, Facebook and Toyota. Their waste management service covers them for all of the major hard drive sizes and locations worldwide. 

For more information, visit their shredding website. Whenever someone tells you to destroy something their been told to destroy forever, the similarity is a red flag. These are sales pitches often used by unscrupulous third-parties to prey on indivuduals to get them to act on behalf of the third party by offering to soften the blow of destruction by promising an alternative. So it’s vital to take this red flag seriously. Get independent legal advice about destroying hard drives. Learn more about independent contracting versus contract shredding in the hard drive world. THE BEST ‘NO PROBLEM’ DELETE PROGRAM If you have a hard drive that holds digital data of some sort and would like to minimise e-waste, consider starting a hard drive recycling business, or at least subscribing to deleting service teams.

Secure Hard Drive Disposal

Most of our businesses and organisations have some type of physical or digital information stored on various storage mediums that are no longer needed. We need to ensure they are securely destroyed so data from the past does not leak into the new, or at least the near future. As well as standard shredding, some organisations choose to use specialised companies that destroy hard disks using specialised chemicals or even specialised lasers. For example, “Perfect Numbers” shredders use lasers to speed up the process. 

The approach is less efficient than traditional shredding, but it can help remove valuable files from storage. Read more about the options for securely disposing of your data and minimizing the risk of data leaks. Standard shredding is effective for small and medium sized businesses when there is only a small amount of data to destroy. But it can take a long time before the data is ‘smashed up’ into small files that can be accessed and deleted. Entire hard drives can often be destroyed, and other media such as CDs or DVDs are often damaged during the process. They recover the data and place the information into an SD card before burning the cards to remove the data. Redoss is a UK based company that specialises in hard disk destruction. They use lasers to burn CDs and DVDs to a crisp and use specialized chemicals to permanently destroy hard drives. The primary reasons for the company to use lasers is to speed up the destruction process. 

If you have any questions about how to ensure your data is securely destroyed, please contact their team. Redoss work with many large and small businesses and are very experienced in hard drive disposal. For more information, visit their website Ideally, computers should be destroyed by CPUs and motherboards by RAM. The average person ends up using computers over 3 million times each, so physically destroying any computer either reduces the likelihood of it being recovered in some way (by anyone), or increases the time and cost of creating a good backup of the data. Regular reviews of our PC’s, laptops, and smartphones by tech reporters can uncover computers that may have been left connected to wireless networks. 

Therefore the data on these devices can be unexpectedly recovered and used by cyber-crooks to unlock new accounts and steal data. By physically destroying these devices, we can lower the risk of accidentally allowing these devices to be used by hackers or used to store digital passwords or web credentials. Read more about destroying your mobile data using a desktop computer.