Computer disposal?

comicmankev

I work in a school and we have a very large supply of old OC's and broken monitors to get rid of.

I have checked all the charities and nowadays they all have minimum specs, to which ours sadly are several years older that that! We are talking in the region of over 100 units, and have recently been quoted a disposal cost of £9.75 PER MONITOR and £4 per machine!

I like to recycle where possible, as well as re-use. But I can't think of what to do with these, and certainly do not want the school to pay those ludicrous sums!

Any suggestions?

BillScarab

Is freecycle a possibility ?

I know where we work we can't give old electrical goods away as apparently if they were to cause a fire or something we could still be held liable, so everything gets scrapped or disposed of officially. I'm not sure if the same would apply to a school.

ricksExpensive

Hi Comic!

I work at a college and we are part of the cresant group which most education establishments are part of and as well as cheap products we get free disposal of old IT equipment! You could see if your part of them.

Or you can try http://www.enviro-pc.com/ they do free disposal but im not sure what areas.

Rick

albertross_2

Don't the DfE/Lea not to mention the HSE and DP commissioner have numerous regulations and procedures that you must follow in disposing of the equipment?

£4 for securely wiping a hard disk, before it is transported to India for someone to poison themselves trying to get hold of a resistor, isn't bad value for money imo.

These may be of use if you want to wipe the data yourself..

http://www.cbltech.ca/data-shredder.html
http://dban.sourceforge.net/
both free. Overwrite 7 or more times.

Personally, I wouldn't trust any outside company to do it, especially at that price.

johnmc

Our local tip have a recycle shop. Everything electrical is PAT tested before sale and all "profit" goes to a local charity.

County Council are doing an upgrade and are offering old units to charities or for sale to staff (after, of course, being scrubbed).

yellowlawn

I work for a local council and we advise schools to use an outside company who can guarantee data destruction. The few pounds you mention is nothing in comparison to the amount of flack you would recieve should these turn up at your local computer fair with your pupils data on. Do you get any IT support from your local council, if so contact them and find out who they recommend. Whoever you choose make sure you get something in writing of there guarantee of data destruction. It's only the hard drives that matter. The rest you can cash in with at your local PC fair.

comicmankev

I'm not saying this is a bad price for disposal, but would prefer it if we didnt have to pay!

Thanks for all the responses. I will look inot a couple of them.

And as for data protection, before anyone gets to excited, these were all client machines on a network. There will be no details on them. Of course, I know some can still gain info from such machines, but, Not the sort of personal info that most will be worried about!

albertross_2

If kids or teachers had access to these PC's, I would have thought you would have to be especially careful about what could be gleaned from their contents.. email addresses, home addresses, marks, etc.. It's a news of the world story waiting to happen.