Safe E-Waste Disposal: Why It s Important to an IT Pro by Jeica Bundy

I had the opportunity to talk to Mischa Krilov, System Administrator and IT Wizard for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA). We talked about the importance he places on the secure and environmentally safe disposal of e-waste and other IT assets.

Mischa, how does NOCCA partner with Iron Mountain?

We use Iron Mountain to make sure that we are responsibly destroying and recycling our old electronic media. All of our old hard drives, all of our old USB disks, even our floppy disks that we find in file cabinets need to be securely destroyed.

Rather than just bringing all this over to our Visual Arts Workshop and dumping it into the forge, or over to the drill press, or running it through the band saw, it's much more responsible to bring it to a certified partner who can destroy and recycle the material.

Do state regulations require you to have a certification when you destroy information?

As a state agency, we have a wide variety of requirements related to the proper disposal of personal information, particularly when it deals with minors, since we are, in fact, a high school. Sometimes we don't know what's on the old equipment. It may have student data. It may have financial data. In some cases we know what's there, but we have no way to electronically destroy the materials.

In addition to simply destroying the equipment, all Louisiana's IT professionals need to provide documentation that we have responsibly destroyed information.

How much e-waste do you destroy annually?

In the server room, we have a locked cabinet where we keep the more secure items. We also keep a box that says To Be Destroyed, where all of the regularly sensitive material that needs to be destroyed goes. Last year we destroyed two and a half boxes of stuff, so about 40 to 50 lbs.

How did you hear about Iron Mountain?

Right after Hurricane Katrina, I was working for a Fortune 500 company in Austin and they used Iron Mountain for data vaulting. Iron Mountain was part of the weekly schedule of bringing in old tapes that were ready to get recycled and taking back the new tapes that needed to go offsite for backup. So I've used Iron Mountain previously.

Other than being in compliance with the law, are there any other benefits that you've seen?

It makes people feel a lot better about being green in a measurable fashion. The material that's in electronic waste is really, really bad. It's not just bad for the trees. It's bad for people. It's bad for everybody. You don't want to simply throw this stuff away. You just don't.

Giving it to Iron Mountain, I know you guys will not actually melt it down, but that you'll handle it dependably, so that way, our stuff gets actually recycled in a responsible fashion.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2016/customer-stories/safe-e-waste-dispo...
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