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What Do IT Disposal Companies Do?

Published on 13 December 2019

What Do IT Disposal Companies Do?

To be able to stay ahead of your direct competition and to be able to run your business as efficiently as possible, your company needs to keep its IT equipment up to date and functioning at optimal levels.

However, your company IT equipment will not last forever. There will come a time when your equipment will either break down, cease to function correctly or the technology will become obsolete so you will not be able to find replacement parts easily, if at all.

When the time comes to update and replace your IT equipment, this leaves you with the problem of what to do with your existing IT assets. Do you simply dispose of them by throwing out your old equipment, or do you just ignore it as you slowly start to stockpile it in some out of the way storeroom where it can be easily be forgotten about?

GDPR and WEEE Directive concerns

Unfortunately, a business cannot afford to throw away any of its redundant IT equipment for a number of reasons. The most important of these reasons is to do with your obligation to protect your company data and dispose of it securely, in accordance with GDPR, Data Protection Act, rules and regulations.

Should your company throw away any of its data-bearing IT equipment you will be exposing yourself to the risk of a data breach. Depending on the type of data that you store and use as part of your business procedures, you could also be exposing the private data of your customers to ID theft.

The government looks very poorly on companies that don't do everything they possibly can to protect their data, so careless disposal of your IT equipment can see your company being hit with very severe penalties by HMRC.

The WEEE Directive also makes the safe and secure disposal of your spent business IT and electronic equipment a business-critical issue.

What is the WEEE Directive?

The WEEE Directive stands for the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. This directive became legislation in 2007 and applies to most electrical products that have a plug or needs a battery for operation.

The main aim of the directive is to reduce the amount of waste electrical products going to the landfill and instead to promote their reuse wherever possible. What this means for UK businesses (and householders) is that they can no longer treat items that fall in the WEEE category as general household waste and dispose of them via their regular local authority rubbish collection.

The government instead ask businesses to set up and implement a company policy to deal with their electronic waste and ensure that their redundant IT assets and other electronic equipment are disposed of in accordance with the rules of the directive.

To make things easier for business owners to comply with their responsibilities under both GDPR and WEEE rules, it is normal practice for them to work with professional IT disposal companies, such as Restore Technology, to make sure that they meet with their requirements and can show evidence of their compliance.

Working with Restore Technology

Restore Technology is one of five divisions of the Restore Group, a business support company that offers a wide range of services to UK businesses including IT relocation, business document storage and management, confidential paper shredding, document scanning, secure IT disposal, and more.

All of the services offered by Restore work to complement each other and collectively work to keep our customer's waste products out of the landfill. Restore is the largest UK-owned business in this sector and we are proud to support UK businesses of all sizes as well as public sector organisations with our high-quality comprehensive services.

Each of our divisions is highly specialised within our sector and hold many industrial accreditations for our work, meaning we can provide the highest level of assistance for each and every service we offer.

Restore targeted services

Each of our services is broken down into sections that match with the lifespan of our customer's assets, including the life-cycle of their IT assets.

This means that Restore can offer your company specific services according to the age of your assets, such as our 'pre-life' services that mainly deals with taking care of your current and existing needs, such as IT refreshes, imaging and deployment.

Our 'mid-life' services are to help cover your operational assets, including IT and server relocation services and technical support. So if your company is rapidly expanding and you need to move to larger business premises, we are here to help with your critical moves with decommissioning, moving and recommissioning your company servers and IT infrastructure.

Eventually, you will need to engage our 'end-of-life' services which are geared towards the safe disposal of your obsolete, broken and redundant IT assets and electronic equipment. This will include the secure destruction of your confidential data and the resale of any useful assets to help you recoup some of the cost of your original asset expenditure.

No matter which section of the Restore family your business currently needs, we are here to help you and will provide you with our highly trusted services for as long as you need us.

IT disposal services

Like most IT disposal companies, Restore Technology will help you to safely dispose of your redundant business IT assets. However, with our years of experience and technical expertise, our unique IT disposal services exceed current UK security guidelines, which means that when you work with Restore Technology, you will be confident that your confidential data will be protected above and beyond current recognised standards set in the UK.

Because of the wide range of specific services offered by the Restore group, you will discover that you will never need to look elsewhere for a company that can meet your needs. Once you have worked with us, you will realise that we can fulfil all of your business needs.

Cutting-edge IT asset disposal services

We understand that the demand for newer and more sophisticated IT equipment and technology is what drives a company forward and helps to make business processes more efficient. However, this demand also means that the rate at which any given electronic device reaches the end of its useful life is rising.

Keeping up with the pace of modern technology has become a global issue for many companies about what they should do with their obsolete electronic equipment.

It is not just an issue with laptop computers, but also tablets, batteries, hard drives, data storage devices, telephones, printers and photocopiers that all need special consideration when they need replacing.

The two main concerns for a company wanting to dispose of their spent assets is over data protection and the WEEE Directive.

Luckily, when you work with Restore Technology to dispose of your spent IT assets, we can offer you our secure IT disposal service where we can either come out to your business premises to safely dispose of your data-bearing devices, such as computer hard drives, storage discs and other forms of electronic data storage devices, or we can collect your data-bearing devices for secure off-site disposal.

On-site Data Destruction

Restore Technology offer our customers a secure on-site IT data destruction service that you can witness first hand so you can be 100% certain that your sensitive data-bearing devices have been completely destroyed.

You can book one of our state-of-the-art mobile shredding vehicles to come to your business premises to perform the secure destruction of your spent data-bearing IT assets, such as computer hard drives and other data-bearing electronic devices.

Our team of fully-vetted security experts are all fully uniformed and carry ID to confirm their identity. Our team of trained operatives will complete a detailed list of the assets that you need to be destroyed so you will have a complete paper trail and proof of final destruction for auditing purposes.

Secure off-site data destruction services

We understand that a lot of businesses and organisations don't have the available ground-level access space to accommodate one of our mobile shredding vehicles. If you don't have a loading or delivery yard or secure car park where we can safely park our shredding vehicle, instead we can arrange for the secure pick-up, transportation and off-site destruction of your redundant IT assets at one of our secure destruction depots.

Our off-site IT destruction services are ideal for businesses that reside in high-rise office blocks or within city-centre buildings without parking facilities.

There is no need to worry about the security of your data while being transported to our destruction centre. Your IT assets will be fully tracked and supervised in our unmarked security collection vehicles.

At no point in time will your IT assets be left unsupervised or exposed to risk as we will collect and deliver your assets to our secure destruction facility in one swift operation. Our security vehicles are satellite tracked and you will be able to access a recorded audit trail using STREAMS®, our customer web-based portal.

Full accreditation and compliance

When dealing with your company's most sensitive and confidential data destruction, you need to be sure that you choose the right partner to help you to fulfil your needs and meet your compliance. 

Restore Technology offers a range of secure services and our data destruction operations are accredited to ISO: 27001 Information Management Standard.  ISO:9001, ISO: 14001 and ISO: 27001 accredited companies such as ours are the only services you should trust with the custody of your sensitive data destruction if you want to protect your company from the risks of a data breach and IT theft.

We will also supply you with a copy of all relevant paperwork that proves you have met with your compliance, such as a detailed certificate of destruction and other compliance paperwork you need for your audit trail.

Recycling and reducing your carbon footprint

Restore Technology has a zero-landfill policy that means when you choose us as a partner to help your business securely dispose of your old IT equipment, none of your waste materials will end up in the landfill.

We can help your company to meet with your own commitments towards compliance with current environmental requirements, rules and regulations.

Not only do we provide your business with secure IT destruction, but we go a lot further than other IT disposal companies. We make sure that every scrap of your waste is recycled instead of adding to the country's growing waste problem.

Our company follows a reduce, reuse and recycle ethos. We have a range of downstream partners that we work with that can take your raw material waste, IT components and used electrical equipment in accordance with Environment Agency Legislation to either refurbish and reuse, salvage usable components to use for spares and repairs, and raw materials that can be melted down to make new products.

Contact Restore Technology today!

Do not hesitate to contact our friendly team at Restore Technology for your secure and fully auditable IT asset disposal and secure data destruction services. We are happy to answer your questions and discuss your needs.

Your company will receive all necessary compliance paperwork including an official certificate of destruction that you can use to show your company met with all of your requirements for the secure handling and disposal of your data-bearing IT devices.