Recycle with your head, not your heart

Most people are Nice. Many (like me) are occasionally grumpy when cornered but given a friendly approach and a bit of TLC and they open up, answer your question and move on from there. It can still be a no but it is a nice no.

After some thirty five years in sales and customer service one way or another, I am used to a no. I don’t get offended by it as an answer. Not if it is delivered with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders because it is not personal.

But when you find someone who has been tricked into recycling with a shyster, and you try to put them right, you have to take care. I am learning that slowly. Because often people have been taken in by the idea of doing good. They think they are donating to a charity and that makes them feel good. Then some old fool like me comes along and bursts their bubble.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. Exporting second hand IT equipment to Africa is not a good thing at all. Even if it is done by a charity, and even if it really does get to a kid (not all do by any means) it is still going to end up in landfill one day fairly soon. We are merely exporting our problems and doing untold damage to the planet. I cannot accept that is a good thing.

It is not actually illegal to export ‘working’ equipment. This is where we enter one of those grey areas you need a law degree to get out of to be honest. I need to issue a waste transfer note to collect anything for recycling which means it is waste, but if it is in working condition I can then send it straight out to Ghana.

Responsible recyclers have a problem with that. Our first principle is to keep things out of landfill and even if that clapped out PC works for six months it is still going to get put in the ground, by yet another bare foot, underfed child paid a pittance in terrible conditions. Ergo donating equipment to a charity that will export stuff legally is a bad thing. Giving it to a shyster that will do it illegally is so much worse, and telling the difference between the two is really hard.

So if green is important to you, giving your old kit to a charity is a non-starter, unless their operations are exclusively in this country, or another country covered by decent WEEE regulations. Equally unfortunately for you, that knocks out more or less all of the free collection services. Most of these use (and abuse) the charitable model and unless your kit is reasonably new the only way to make cash out of it was to flog it for illegal export. Or skimp on the paperwork and the data erasure.

And that really would put the cat amongst the pigeons because there are a lot of people getting rid of their stuff for free. The entire back catalogue of this blog explains why that is generally a terrible idea. Not only are these people getting fooled into thinking they are doing something nice, but they are also taking unbelievable risks with their data security.

I am fairly sure that people simply hear or see the word charity and they let their hearts rule their heads. Because this is not their money they are donating remember. This is those three old PC’s from accounts. They imagine the happy smiling faces of African children joyfully working on their new computer and pat themselves on the back. The idea that they should do due diligence and work out what is really happening does not even enter their heads.

But it should. Their data is on those hard drives. And their moral responsibility should make them at least ask a few questions. Like what real use is a clapped out 5 year old desktop? Scrap value is a fiver and yet this ‘charity’ is going to do what with it?

Even if their data is properly dealt with (it is possible but unlikely on a free collection) they are ignoring the fact that we are exporting our waste to landfill on another continent. That is not something to make your heart sing my dears. It is quite the opposite.

I am not saying every charity is bad by any means. I have problems with the level of admin costs with almost all of them, and the fact that they have highly paid executives, but a lot of good work is clearly being done all over the world. But in this instance, ask some hard questions with your head.

Is this export legally done? If yes, the charity will have an export license of some sort, some sort of proof they are allowed to do what they do. It is not unreasonable in this day and age to ask to see a copy. I can email you a PDF of any certificate or license we have, right now.

How do they deal with the stuff they have exported at end of life? Are they arranging for ethical recycling? Or is it being disposed of locally (IE landfill)?

There is a huge campaign building against the amount of legal WEEE hitting Africa. There is an Environment Agency task force, there are prosecutions, just Google it. But if you know where to go you can easily get £200 a pallet for any old junk if you are willing to take the risk. And a lot of these not for profit fronts have a business raking it in behind them.

EReco are a business. Of course we want to make a profit. We put a value on our services that some people appreciate. Others don’t and you can tell me no thanks not today, any time you like. That is your prerogative. But please, don’t be fooled by this disgrace. If you are ‘giving’ to charity, check it out. Ask some questions.

I have. I am having an interesting email correspondence with one 'charity' who doesn't want to answer my questions. It is like getting a straight answer out of Tony Blair.  So far he has said he is careful where he sends kit, and that it is really only practical if it is less than five years old. He also let slip that Uganda, that world economic powerhouse, has just banned the import of used electronic equipment.

That alone should make you think.

250m Kilos of WEEE in my wardrobe

Strange things are emerging from the darkest recesses of East Grinstead. Regular readers may well remember that we are opening our doors to the good people of our home town to wipe their hard drives for free. (See news section of www.ereco.co.uk for fully details).

I have had a regular stream of calls since appearing on Meridian 107FM and our nice article in the East Grinstead Courier. It seems that people are digging out old PC’s they were too frightened to get rid of. One lady even told me her son had delivered his old PC to her, as he had moved away from the area, but wanted to dispose of his old kit safely and responsibly.

In a way it has restored my faith in human nature. Clearly there are quite a few consumers who realise that their data is still there and don’t want to trust the local tip to protect it. To be honest we never truly expected to be swamped with old kit. To us it was more about publicising the issue, and of course raising awareness of our name. But it looks like we will see quite a few takers, and I will faithfully report back early in the New Year.

I firmly believe personal data security is something we do need to keep banging on about, because concerns about it are there, which means piles of un-recycled kit are there too. And I am not immune either, although mine is more about laziness than fear, as nothing I have tucked away at home has a memory.

My haul starts with an old video player, which I keep because I still have old videos too. And no, I haven’t turned it on in recent memory. Then there is a Virgin cable TV box, redundant since I upgraded to TiVo some two years ago. The engineer did not want to take it and Virgin seem to have decided it is worthless, so not knowing what to do with it I put it with the video player. On a shelf in my wardrobe.

Next is an old CD/Radio from when I used to play CD’s. I think I also have a few wires and cables and two old mobiles. Maybe 3. I live in a flat, a block of 12, and if we all had a similar haul that is a pretty impressive load. I reckon maybe 10 kilos of stuff in my flat...and according to Wikipedia there are over 25,000,000 households in the UK. So that is 250m kilos of WEEE or about 275,000 tons.

According to a quick Google the last available figures for WEEE tonnage is 2012 and the figure was just over 500k tons.

Now maths was never my strong point but I think I am suggesting that six months worth of WEEE collections are sitting in my wardrobe...

eReco on Tour ‘Amnesty Live 2014/15’

Don’t worry – I am not going to sing.

I am a reluctant desk jockey. I like to be out and about, life on the open road and all that jazz. I also genuinely like meeting people face to face. Telephones are functional things. You lose the facial expressions and body language which are so important in building rapport. I also like to know when people have smiled at one of my jokes. I also irritate the hell out of Michelle (Our toner recycling program administrator) and Denise (credit control, accounts and all round good time gal) and have to give them a break occasionally before they kill me.

So last Friday I decided to tackle our local town, East Grinstead in West Sussex, ostensibly to promote our rather excellent Amnesty aimed at local residents, giving them a chance to get rid of their old PC’s, laptops etc whilst ensuring that the hard disks are properly wiped. We have been in the East Grinstead Courier (http://www.eastgrinsteadcourier.co.uk/) and on Meridian 107FM to promote the notion of data security to the uninitiated, so I wanted to follow that up with local businesses so that they could tell their employees. Full Amnesty details can be found in the news section on www.ereco.co.uk

And yes, of course, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to sell our services too. Because if you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that far too many businesses are unaware of what they should be doing with their old equipment. I reckoned that I would have a nice soft approach to get talking to people, and that would lead to other things, as is my want.

East Grinstead is a fairly normal South Eastern town for the uninitiated; real commuter country, clearly prosperous in places and in others just a tad the other way. A nice little town centre with a few empty shops, the usual selection of charity shops, a big Waitrose and a Sainsbury’s. For those that don’t know it, we are 8 miles from Gatwick, 30 from Brighton and 40 odd from London. The infamous Mr Angry from Tunbridge Wells is only ten miles or so away...

As a barometer of IT recycling efficiency I expected it to be fairly normal. I have enjoyed similar days in Dorking, Horsham and Reigate in the last couple of months, and I reckon I have a feel for the SME market now, but here are some key results from my Friday travails.

1. I am not joking about people having a pile of IT kit somewhere in their office. 
2. People really do think deleting files in Windows and emptying their recycle bin is data safe.
3. I am a natural flirt.
4. A surprising amount of people read the East Grinstead Courier.
5. Likewise listen to Meridian 107FM. It is generally agreed that I really have the perfect face for radio and that my voice is ok. I may sing...
6. It is getting quite cold.
7. Business owners/senior managers do not think about the kit they are disposing of as waste at all. They remember how much they paid for it. They resent the idea that it might have a life and a value after them, and they rarely consider the risks of not making sure their old hard drives are properly wiped.
8. There are more coffee shops than there are public toilets.
9. When you get a chance to explain the reality of life to people, you can get through to them and then you can help them.

By the last point, you will realise that I got some sales. There is a reason for that. Well, there are several really. Firstly and most obviously I am not bad at what I do. Secondly, what eReco do is both needed and fairly, transparently priced, and it is usually just a question of finding someone with a pile of junk behind their desk or in the bottom of the cleaner’s cupboard when I am out and about like this. I have not drawn a blank yet from these days out and I am not planning on doing so anytime soon. Thirdly, there are a lot of people who really wanted this problem solved for them, so I cannot claim that there was any true brilliance on my part (false modesty obviously). I just got in their face, explained myself concisely and professionally and gave them the reassurance and information they were looking for.

eReco are ‘selling’ a service I suppose. Except we aren’t, really, in my mind. There is an episode in Red Dwarf when Lister, Rimmer and the Cat end up on Backwards Earth, a place where you jump out of a box in the ground and get progressively younger until eventually you climb back up your mother’s unmentionables and disappear. We are a bit like that in many ways. We take something a business has no further use for, fire it up, mend it, clean it, remove all traces of the previous owner and try to keep it on the road for a few more miles.

Our customers pay for a bit of transport, a fair amount of sorting and moving it around doing stuff, a few bits of legal paperwork and the cost of removing the data. What we are doing is making sustainability possible. 

That is not a service as such; it is our duty.

That might sound a bit heavy but it’s true. If you cut corners with this stuff you aren’t just breaking the rules and risking fines, you are messing with the future. We sometimes get quite passionate about what we do but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we don’t ‘sell’ the real purpose of recycling hard enough.

East Grinstead certainly responded to the personal touch but we have to work together to get the message out there on a wider scale. I have said it before and I will say it again, people...both consumers and businesses (of all sizes) need educating about this stuff. The ‘green’ message is not helped by the perceptions of what ‘green’ is. Sustainability maybe a hash tag on Twitter but the average man in the street needs help to really get it.

The same is true about data security. You only have to listen to the news to realise that...the amount of successful phishing going on, lax passwords, malware breaches...even before you get to the issue of disposing of redundant kit.

People are not taking these issues seriously and that is why eReco will be permanently on tour shouting this stuff from the rooftops.

You have been warned...

I am a Celebrity, Get my Data Out of There!

This week we have had the press in. On Monday we were photographed for the East Grinstead Courier and today we are being interviewed for Meridian 107FM, East Grinstead’s number one radio station, publicising our Christmas initiative

It is a very simple idea, actually. All the best ideas are simple. We want to help educate people about the dangers of throwing away their data, so we are offering to recycle their old IT equipment and wipe their hard disks for free if they drop the stuff off to us on specified days after Christmas. We are suggesting they make a donation to a local charity whilst they do so, but we are trying to ram home the point that old devices contain memories and that you don’t throw memories away.

Consumers are incredibly under informed on this subject. You can Google it and get some advice but it is mostly bad, and anyone who has tried to take something half decent to a council dump ought to be aware of what the dangers are. Because that is where old computers go when they are too old to play Football Manager anymore. You drop them off and the nice man in the hi-viz jacket rushes over and says he will take care of that for you.

If your hard disk still contains your data you are then in the lap of the Gods. Again, this blog does not wish to scare people, and I am not suggesting for a moment that large numbers of computers dumped like this are ending up in the hands of people who wish to steal your identity and empty your bank accounts, but why take the risk?

Your old domestic PC or laptop are worth next to nothing. Pennies probably. But your data is worth rather a lot more. Approaching someone like us and paying £5 to make sure you are safe is surely a better option than trusting to dumb luck?

However, I digress. We were talking about our initiative for the good people of East Grinstead. We are hoping for a good turnout, not least because it would be nice to donate a sizable cheque to charity in January. 

So if you are based in the area, tell your friends.

I was pleasantly surprised that the press guys saw the potential of the story. This sort of thing is both green and about nasty evil villains stealing your bank account details, so I hoped it would get some interest but no arm-twisting was necessary. We had fun trying to get some interesting shots of our data suite. I have to admit that it is not photogenic, and Ben and Aaron were most uncooperative about dressing up for the photo shoot (Short skirts and high heels were requested, they seemed to think I was joking!). So Jane had to drape herself over some laptops and wave some hard drives in the air.

Kevin the photographer played with the exposure and made it all look quite wonderful. I will try to show you more when we get hold of some of his snaps, but here is the one the paper used. Now we just have to make sure that we get our message across live on air and in the written copy.

Jane Taylor, eReco MD, laughing at one of my jokes...

Because this stuff is important. The second hand market is growing all the time and data is going to fall into the hands of the unscrupulous. We need to educate people. And if Hollywood pick me up and I have to leave you all behind, I wish you well. I certainly have the face for radio...