What happens to your old hard drives, routers and tech?

The most effective way to derisk data leak is to PHYSICALLY DESTROY the hard drive from an old computer, after use. This is obviously for older devices that can no longer be reused within the business.

How do you do that? Well, carefully take out the hard drive and dismantle it into smaller parts. Where possible, crush the larger metal and carbon pieces into smaller bits. Then, mix the tiny pieces into wet concrete, along with cement and sand. Let the concrete cure for 7 days. Job done. That old hard drive of yours now rests in pieces (RIP - see what I did there?) in a new extension that someone is living over.

As a real estate developer, this isn't very difficult for us to execute although it may be slightly trickier if you don't have access to wet concrete.

I'm embarrassed to say I have a "room of doom" with an Amiga 500, PlayStation 1, and various laptops and computers that I have used for current and old jobs.

I do have a Mac that won't load again so I can't access it to wipe without paying for a fix, so I've just dumped it in the room of doom for now.

If there was a safe, quick, and easy way to recycle I would love to hear it.

Hi Sean,

My name is Nick, I'm getting in touch from Spring (spring.co.uk), a tech recirculation start-up in London in response to your upcoming article.

Spring is changing the way people consume tech. By providing a seamless, transparent and trusted service for people to sell their pre-loved phones, tablets, laptops and more, Spring is creating a sustainable consumer tech ecosystem and changing ownership preconceptions.

After buying the devices we conduct a thorough data wipe using NSYS software according to NIST, ADISA and R2 standards, refurbish any worn or broken parts and then sell on to new users to extend the product lifecycle, reduce e-waste and feed into the circular economy.

I'd love to talk in more detail about your upcoming article to see how we at Spring can help provide value as tech recirculation experts.

We are a totally online mortgage advice company. We obviously use our private cloud to store our data but our secure desk-based systems obviously at times store files that are in transit to our cloud. When these pc systems become a bit sluggish we personally remove the hard drives put them in a carrier bag and then smash them with a hammer to ensure that no data can ever leak from our organisation in this way. We use it as a kind of stress ball - if we have spent all day battling with lenders in negotiating rate deals for our clients we visualise the lender's underwriters whilst smashing these poor drives :-) We then package the pc and pieces of drives together and despatch to waste recycling. Any financial organisation that doesn't do this is open to data breaches - it might sound anal actually destroying the drives ourselves however we think our clients would appreciate knowing we care that much about their data, rather than passing it to a third party to trust with this process.

We're an outsourced IT department for SMBs and have used various tech disposal companies. We're always skeptical of how secure some of these companies are. The drivers will often arrive in rental vans without uniforms etc, so I doubt their vehicles are tracked, and the transport is as secure as it should be.

Although thorough physical destruction of any data storage device is the best way to ensure data security, this can be messy, to say the least, and creates a lot of e-waste.

Instead, we wipe drives ourselves (3 times over) and then use 'secure' disposal companies to wipe and recycle, so long as they provide data destruction certificates, which are required by many of our client's compliance policies. However recycling companies will only normally accept PC's/laptops.

Recently we've found It's a shame that many of our vendors will not accept end of life products to be returned to them for disposal/recycling. For some common devices, such as routers, there is no recycling route!