When you look up electronic recycling in Google or any other search engine, you find a few too many companies that claim to recycle your computer. Recycling electronics means very different things to different companies and people. Some companies recycle by wiping hard drives and repairing and reselling. Some recycle by taking a few valuable pieces out of the computer and reselling the pieces, e.g. hard drives, connectors, etc. Then they dispose of the remaining parts. That’s actually asset recovery. If someone erases the hard drive completely, that’s great. It’s perfectly fine to resell. But the truth is some companies do not erase data completely. In fact, 40% of all hard drives that are resold on the internet have some data remaining. When I read that, we stopped erasing hard drives and bought our first hard drive shredder. Now we own four shredders and keep them busy.
In my opinion, true e-waste recycling companies disassemble computers down to the raw materials.
Windsor E Recycling has a different model than most electronic recycling companies. Yes, we do recycle down to the raw materials for remanufacturing of new goods. We also shred hard drives for security. One of our priorities is to educate the community about the differences in e-waste recycling.
“You certainly want to focus on value for money, but at the end of the day, the bottom line is it’s all about your brand,” (Rob) Schafer said. “And the last thing you want to do is have your brand splattered on a 60 Minutes exposé, that either your assets are in a landfill in Africa somewhere or your data is for sale on the internet.” E-scrap News
Here is the education part; the reason you want to know how your electronics are being recycled is the security aspect. Not only is your hard drive full of identification, credit card information, social security numbers, and addresses, but your computer has little tags of identification that is connected to you and/or your company. One other reason you want to know about the process is you want to know that your miscellaneous electronic parts are not going to some landfill, here or abroad. Know your electronic recycler.
Our mission is to make proper disposal of electronic waste convenience and secure. We do that by making our services free, including pickup and data destruction by shredding. If you are wondering, we make our money on the metals like copper, gold silver and palladium. Everything is recycled down to the raw materials. Obviously, it’s a volume business.