During the Spring Cleaning - Season 2 event, ITSS hosted a recycling event and offered deeply discounted rates for hardware recycles from departments on campus. Long story short - everyone did a fantastic job in participating!
By the Numbers
We'd like to take a moment and share some numbers with you to help breakdown this event.
382 Hard Drives Recycled
A grand total of 382 hard drives were recycled during the event! That's roughly 290 pounds in hard drives alone that made it into a recycling center instead of trash!
191,000 Gigabytes of Data Securely Wiped
Before recycling, the hard drives go through a secure wiping process that meets the Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M Standards and generates a certificate for audit purposes. The hard drives recycled varied from 120GBs to 2TBs of data, with the vast majority being 500GB drives. That's roughly 191,000 gigabytes , or 186.52 terabytes, of data securely and safely wiped that will not make it into the outside world!
After the secure wipe, we put each drive into a machine that punches a spike through it to make doubly sure that anything you bring to the TechCenter to be destroyed is truly, securely sanitized.
Over 2 Tons of Parts for Reuse
But what about the computers? Those are sent to a recycling center as well. The machines are broken down into their different plastics and metals and put back into the parts-stream to create future computers and other products. We estimated that half of the recycled computers were laptops and half were desktops, which brings us to around 4,775 pounds (over 2 tons!) of parts that will be broken down and reused. Fun fact: that is roughly the weight of a rhinoceros or the tongue of a blue whale!
A Successful Event
All in all, many departments took this opportunity to trim down unnecessary electronics that had been sitting in their departments gathering dust for years, as well as helping the environment by securely recycling their unused or old equipment.
For us at the TechCenter, it was a blast seeing machines from all periods of modern computing and having the opportunity help properly dispose of them.
Thank you all for making this a great event!
Secure Device Disposal Still Available
Please keep in mind that although this event is over, we offer the Secure Device Disposal throughout the year.
Stop by Kirby Plaza 165. We are more than happy to assist!