RECYCLING AND INDUSTRY NEWS

News on computer recycling:


Secret U.S. data found on cast-off hard drive
TheStar.com
June 23, 2009

Journalism students say they paid $40 in Ghana for a second-hand hard drive that contained information about multi-million-dollar defense contracts between the Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and one of the largest military contractors in the United States.

One of the students said the hard drive was purchased in an open-air market in the coastal town of Tema from a local dealer who bought second-hand hard drives by the cargo load.

The drive contained information about hiring and personnel contracts and plans for U.S. defense agencies and the private military contractor Northrop Grumman, they say. The data on the hard drive included sensitive information about hiring practices, which could help people learn how to get into secured positions at places such as airports. The hard drive also contained information such as credit card numbers and family photos. 

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Recycler dumps toxic electronics around the world
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
May 28, 2009

After tracking hazardous waste shipments and dumping around the world, a national environmental group has sounded the alarm about a million pounds of old electronics innocently donated in Pennsylvania.

Basel Action Network contends that the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society and Allegheny County, Pa., should have known that a free electronics recycling program was too good to be true. The environmental group this week issued a report claiming that EarthEcycle -- which collected more than 1 million pounds of old electronics through the Humane Society's recycling campaign in March and April -- ships hazardous waste to countries where it will most likely end up in toxic dumping grounds.

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Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste (video)
60 minutes
November 8, 2008

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.

It's worth risking a visit because much of the poison is coming out of the homes, schools and offices of America. This is a story about recycling - about how your best intentions to be green can be channeled into an underground sewer that flows from the United States and into the wasteland.

That wasteland is piled with the burning remains of some of the most expensive, sophisticated stuff that consumers crave. And 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley discovered that the gangs who run this place wanted to keep it a secret.

What are they hiding? The answer lies in the first law of the digital age: newer is better. In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer. All of this becomes obsolete, electronic garbage called "e-waste."

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Are Your Secrets On eBay?
BusinessWeek
November 3, 2008

Too many employees fail to erase or encrypt sensitive data on their mobile devices before tossing them out, say researchers from British phone company BT Group, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and Edith Cowan University in Australia.

To prove its point, the team recently purchased 161 discarded handheld devices from online auction sites and secondhand outlets in Britain and Australia. One in five, found the researchers, contained details about salaries, company finances, business plans, or board meetings.

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E-Waste: The Dirty Secret of Recycling Electronics
BusinessWeek
October 15, 2008

As the e-waste industry proliferates, it has also become enmeshed in questionable practices that undercut its environmentally friendly image. A recent probe by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found 43 U.S. companies that sought to sell e-waste for export to Asia, in apparent violation of the law. In China and elsewhere, electronic gear commonly is stripped for reusable microchips, copper, and silver; dangerous metals are dumped nearby, often close to farms or sources of drinking water.

The EPA adopted civil rules that went into effect in January 2007 forbidding U.S. companies from exporting monitors and televisions with cathode-ray tubes unless they have approval from the EPA and the receiving country. CRTs electronically project images on screens that are typically made of leaded glass. The gear contains mercury, cadmium, and other toxins that when released carelessly can cause neurological damage in children, among other harmful effects. The blood of children in rural Guiyu, China, a notorious e-waste scavenging site, contained lead at twice the acceptable level set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, according to a 2007 study conducted by Shantou University.

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Don't recycle 'e-waste' with haste, activists warn
USA Today
July 6, 2008

Consumers saddled with old cellphones, TVs and computers are flocking to electronics recycling events, which have sprung up in more than 1,000 communities over the past four years.

But don't be fooled, activists warn. Items collected at free events are sometimes destined for salvage yards in developing nations, where toxins spill into the water, the air and the lungs of laborers paid a few dollars per day to extract materials. 

E-waste disposal rates are poised to accelerate in the run-up to a nationwide switch to digital television signals in February. Less than 20% of all electronic waste is recycled, according to the EPA. The rest ends up in landfills.

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Data Losses May Spur Lawsuits
eWeek
June 12, 2006

From the nation's largest financial services institutions to the local YMCA, legal and privacy experts maintain that organizations that inadvertently or secretly expose their customers' data will increasingly face legal action. 

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'I just bought your hard drive'
MSNBC
June 5, 2006

One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was alarmed. He knew the old hard drive was loaded with his personal information -- his Social Security number, account numbers and details of his retirement investments. But that's not all. The computer also included data on his wife, Roma, and their children and grandchildren, including some of their Social Security numbers. 

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Computer "recycler" dumps computers on private land
STLtoday
June 3, 2006

When a man with a truck offered to "recycle" a load of old computer monitors in 2001, the University City School District was happy to pay him $5 apiece to be rid of them. So district officials were distressed to learn that some of its equipment has turned up dumped in a once-idyllic place called Echo Valley amid stately cottonwoods and spring daisies.

"When someone tells you they're going to dispose of them properly, you don't expect them to come back and haunt you years later," said Daphne Dorsey, spokeswoman for the district.

"We get statements from recyclers saying they will dispose of them properly. But what they do with them, we don't know. Because all we have is a piece of paper," said Charles Norwood of the Irving Independent School District in Texas. 

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Idaho utility hard drives — and data — turn up on eBay
ComputerWorld
May 4, 2006

Anybody with five bucks and a little patience may be able to score sensitive corporate or customer data on eBay.

Idaho Power Co. discovered that possibility last week as it scrambled to track down company disk drives that had been sold on eBay without having been scrubbed first. Data on the drives, which had been used in servers, contained proprietary company information such as memos, correspondence with some customers and confidential employee information, the company said.

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Patients sue doctor over old computer
Kansas City Star
July 14, 2005

Legal fallout continues to rain down on a Leawood plastic surgeon who placed a computer with private patient records in his trash. Two patients of Daniel Bortnick filed a class-action lawsuit against the physician and his practice, Monarch Plastic Surgery. The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages for negligence, invasion of privacy and breach of fiduciary duty.

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Child protective services agency data found on Nigerian hard drives
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
October 26, 2005

Members of an environmental group who bought computer hardware at a Nigerian market say they found confidential data from Wisconsin's child protective services agency on the hard drive.

State officials are trying to figure out how and why the sensitive information - including children's full names and locations - would remain on hard drives that had been reformatted to eliminate the information before being sent for recycling or disposal.

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You Can Go To Jail For Improper PC Disposal
InformationWeek
September 22, 2005

Few corporate executives know that they can be fined or jailed for improper disposal of computers, according to a recent survey by Hewlett-Packard Financial Services. More than 75% of respondents underestimate the cost of computer disposal. More than 65% of executives with purchasing authority are unaware of the fines they can face for ignoring environmental regulations.

Futhermore, recent legislation holds top executives and IT managers accountable for violating customer protection and privacy rules. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act allows fines up to $250,000 and 10 years in prison for each violation of patient health information privacy rules. The Gramm-Leach-Billey Act imposes penalties of up to $100,000 per violation for financial institutions that fail to protect customer information.

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Data Disposal: A Crushing Problem?
Desktop Pipeline
July 14, 2005

Consumer interest in safely ditching data has been fueled by a steady stream of reports of personal records found on used equipment. The latest survey to spook PC users came in May when O&O Software, a German maker of disk-erase and -recovery software, bought 100 hard disks on eBay and found them chock full of corporate and institutional data such as charge card numbers, pin numbers, worker evaluations, and court documents.  

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Discarded Hard Drives Still Contain Data
CIO Today
June 1, 2005

A study commissioned by the German firm O&O Software, a developer of hard-drive utilities, found that of 200 hard drives purchased through eBay , 71 percent had data that could be reconstructed.

The company did a similar study in 2004 and found that 88 of 100 disks bought through the auction site contained easily recovered data.

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Gartner Says PC Disposal Costs Must Be Considered in Total Cost of Ownership
Gartner Press Release
September 29, 2003

When disposing of obsolete and surplus IT equipment, most enterprises are unaware that the various costs associated with the disposal usually exceed the proceeds from the sale, according to a new report by Gartner, Inc. 

For some enterprises, however, the cost is much higher, because of failing to properly dispose of PCs or to eliminate confidential data residing on the drives. Many enterprises have paid a high price in costs, regulatory fines, bad publicity and even litigation when their PCs turned up in landfills or third-world countries, or when confidential data was recovered from hard drives that had not been properly sanitized.

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Used hard drives are not blank
Associated Press
January 16, 2003

So, you think you have cleaned all your personal files from that old computer hard drive you are selling? A pair of MIT graduate students suggests you think again.

Over two years, Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat assembled a collection of 158 used hard drives, shelling out between $5 and $30 for each at secondhand computer stores and on eBay.
Of the 129 drives that functioned, 69 still had recoverable files on them and 49 contained "significant personal information" -- medical correspondence, love letters, pornography and 5,000 credit card numbers. One even had a year's worth of transactions with account numbers from an ATM in Illinois.

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VA toughens security after computer disposal blunders
Federal Computer Week
August 26, 2002

The Department of Veterans Affairs is tightening its policy on the disposal of old computers following disclosures that 139 computers containing sensitive personal information about veterans, including their medical records, were given away.

The computers' hard drives contained a wealth of personal data, including information about a veteran with AIDS and others with mental health problems. Some computers also contained the numbers of 44 government credit cards.

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PC recycling businesses handle glut of toxic computers
Kansas City Star
May 9, 2000

More than 315 million computers are expected to become obsolete by the year 2004, containing an estimated 1.2 billion pounds of lead, 2 million pounds of cadmium, 400,000 pounds of mercury and 1.2 million pounds of hexavalent chromium.

The problem is creating a boom for PC recycling businesses that resell or dispose of these systems. Governments officials are also beginning to react. The Environmental Protection Agency conducts an Electronic Product Recovery and Recycling Roundtable through which business, government and other officials can trade ideas on how to handle the glut of obsolete gear.

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IT departments find it difficult to dispose of obsolete computers
Computerworld
April, 10, 2000

Only 39% of 102 IT managers surveyed by Computerworld said they have a consistent, companywide policy for dealing with retired hardware. More than 20 million PCs became obsolete in 1998 -- but just 14% of those were recycled or donated.

Without a plan in place, PC disposal is a scramble for IT departments. For example, when one company was trying to shed its retired PCs, the machines sat for six months in building space that the company normally rents out for $17.50 per sq. ft. Another company’s staff recently spent several weeks erasing hard drives and finding nonprofits to take 250 computers that were no longer useable after their Y2k remediation.

Meanwhile, some computer recyclers – which buy used PCs to resell or dismantle for scrap -- are so flush that they're turning away recycling business.

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Computer retirement costs add up quickly
Entrepreneurial Edge Direct
April 25, 2000

Decommissioning a computer isn’t cheap. Hard drives must be scrubbed of proprietary data, internal components may have to be removed, and the systems must then be readied for shipment or storage. For a large company the labor and other costs can total well over $300 per machine.

Legislators are beginning to apply pressure. On April 1, Massachusetts began to require that computer monitors be recycled. The European Commission wants all PC manufacturers to take back used equipment, handle the recycling and phase out all toxic ingredients by 2004.




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