Sustainability is NOT ‘a bit Gay’

In my limited experience, 15 year old boys are not into lengthy debates. In a straw poll of one that sort of thing was deemed a bit gay. However, they can also be perceptive and commendably pithy when they put their minds to it. An example of that would be his views on what we do here in eReco land. We have discussed it upon occasion. Which means I have wittered on about it a few times and every now and then he seems to have been listening. Maybe his Xbox was lagging at the time and he focussed in on something I said?

He said that we talked far more about the data security than we did about the recycling. And I realised that it was true, we really do. The recycling side of things is largely taken for granted, or in fact ignored as there is a general assumption that we will sell everything on for a large profit and make our fortunes on it all...because where there’s muck there’s brass.

Yes, we remarket if we can – because it is best practise. Extending lifecycles stops someone building another one, or so the theory goes. But there is quite a lot that we cannot remarket for one reason or another. And that is where the recycling takes over of course. We break it down and pile it up until we have enough to sell, to reputable people who turn our piles into something else. There is no crock of gold, not even at the end of the rainbow. We store this stuff, sometimes for a very long time, until we have enough to sell on, but it always goes to a new home.

Which, as my lad said, is important. Being born of the recycling generation, where stepping over the plastic bins and boxes to get to the fridge is part of everyday life, he knows what sustainability is and he cares. Not quite as much as he cares about FIFA15 or his dear French teacher’s unreasonable homework demands, but he still cares. Whether it is blazer’s made out of plastic bottles or polar bears having some ice left to frolic on, this new generation get ‘it’.

The problem is we don’t. Not yet, at any rate. In fact, we have a double problem, because people are often not too bothered about the data side either. That is going to change as the fines rise to 3% of global turnover and directors are made personally accountable for data breaches, but do we really have to wait for the next generation before we start to care about making our business dealings sustainable?

This blogs best week in terms of readership was when I did a series of posts about scammers pretending to be like eReco and sending thousands of tonnes of WEEE to Africa. Read back if you are interested. But you can stop it. Overnight. Yes you. 

As long as we start to take our responsibilities seriously.

How? It’s easy really.

First, when budgeting for new equipment, include something for the disposal and data cleansing of the old. It does not need to be much, maybe 10% on the bottom line cost, but it will give your staff a bit of wriggle room to do things properly. Because almost every business these days says it wants to do nice things for the environment, and this is actually an easy one. And whilst you are at it, you may as well make sure you don’t get fined by the Information Commissioner at the same time.

Secondly, choose your partner carefully. You need a professional to help you, but get a good one who knows what they are doing and can prove it. Ask questions. Challenge what they say they will do and why. It will not take long. It is not rocket science.

Thirdly, be responsible. Your first priority is managing the many risks associated with your data security. Then you can support sustainability. And finally you can either try to get some money back on your old kit to offset your costs or you can do even more good and donate to charity.

Mine is Bigger than yours!

Size matters. In terms of IT recycling if you are a really big business you are constantly going to be refreshing assets, so you will have the necessary partnerships, build the internal knowledge and have a good idea about what you want and need to do. Hopefully. Not always the case but in my experience the best businesses ‘have a plan’.

This makes a sense to me. I spoke to one customer this week about their plan, and it was quite revealing. They budget for asset disposal and look to enhance that budget by selling on their kit through us.

The thing that really struck me was the level of realism. They knew they were not giving us anything with great residual value but it was our ability to squeeze every last drop out of assets that made us an important part of the equation.

Take laptops. They dispose of 200 at a time and although they are usually beaten to within an inch of their lives, matching sets like that retain value to some people in the market. Maybe only £15 per laptop but for 200 that is £3,000 and that paid for the collection and data wiping of the laptops and two full van loads of assorted WEEE (Better described as waste in this case).

Our client has 3 priorities – data security, responsible disposal and the right paperwork. When you are running an IT system that covers the globe and several thousand users you need to be organised and keep detailed records, and you need to comply with all regulations. He is fully onboard with my first principle of managing risk.

The really refreshing part of this was the realism about what we actually do. For a start, collecting 2 full van loads of stuff is not easy or cheap. 3 guys were gone for eleven hours door to door. It then took another three hours to unload and track it all in, because it had to be secure before we shut up for the night of course. Then the data erasure of some 300 machines begins. And the paperwork starts churning out waste transfer notes and asset lists. We then have to think about PAT testing everything and finding a buyer. Do we have to clean, repair, reload software?

Doing all that for free is simply not possible. We agreed with our client on a collection fee, data charges and a revenue share going forwards. He is in no hurry for the money. They are a world class multi-national business and a couple of grand would not cover the mineral water bill in their conference rooms around the globe, but at the end of the year his budget still has to hang together and hit the right figure, and that is when the bottom line matters.

On a smaller scale, I can see how this stuff gets difficult. Let’s run the scenario again making it 20 laptops, not £200. That is £300 resale value, of which the company share is £150 at best. Not really a lot to play with. We still have to send the van out and let’s say same distance but half the time. As long as I could match the collection up with others and fill the van that way and it was not way off the beaten track, collection and data erasure would be between £150 and £200.

But you do have to remember that this really is waste. Your people have beaten this kit into the ground and got every penny of life out of it. If you refreshed more regularly decent laptops can get £100-200 each depending on the specification and age. But you don't, do you?

Hence, smaller disposals seem to cost more. And of course most businesses are smaller. They do not do this stuff all the time, and therefore they do not necessarily have a plan. They are often not realistic about what it is all going to cost. They may not appreciate the risks they have to manage.

And yet no business can afford to take this stuff less than seriously. Those three overriding principles remain the same, data security, sustainability and value for money. The smaller you are maybe the third seems hardest to achieve, but we will work with you to help.

And big or small, the fine is still £500k.

Man Flu and the Education of the Masses

Never sell to a sales person. Not if you want to keep your sanity. I was reminded of this when, in my role as Commercial Manager, which is posh for sales and marketing manager, I took a call about email marketing.

The young man was trying to get me to divulge the marketing segments I was interested in, so that he could rattle off the zillions of relevant email addresses he had to sell me. But as I may have mentioned in the last few blogs, I am suffering from a severe dose of man flu. I am therefore not at my most patient or friendly. In fact, I am actually a miserable old git. The girls in the office are being very nice but I suspect they are planning to kill me if I don’t recover my normal genial persona very soon.

So, in answer to who my targets were, I said everyone. No seriously. Yes everyone. Any business or organisation, charity, public sector, school or drug dealer who has electronic devices of a data bearing nature. Surely I want some more than others? No, I want everyone. Even drug dealers are legally required to recycle.

Which was me being obtuse. Of course, I want people with lots of data bearing devices to dispose of unnaturally early in their lifecycle who laugh at my jokes and have no apparent budgetary concerns. I will have as many of those as you can give me, thank you very much.

Size is really the only thing that makes a difference. Because if you are big you produce a lot of waste and you naturally develop a process to dispose of it. Or so you would think. As I may have pointed out once or twice, regular readers will confirm this, not having a process leaves you as a disaster waiting to happen.

I had a very interesting meeting with a new entity set up to deal with several large areas of the education sector the other day. Sort of outsourced government stuff if you see what I mean. Nice chaps. Seemed to like the odd joke I threw in and listened to what we had to say. Their previous supplier was a bit lax about the paperwork apparently.

Well I say previous but I mean current, soon to be previous. In the wonderful in-sourcing and outsourcing world, these guys were getting organised, starting with a clean slate, and the fact that they were exposed to a large amount of doggy-doo hitting the proverbial fan had unnerved them just a little. They wanted to put in place a much better arrangement, and who better than eReco with our DIPCOG approval and ADISA certification. We showered them in paperwork, generally showing them what we could do and I am hopeful that we will have a fruitful arrangement going forwards. I am dusting off my second meeting jokes already.

But the point is they are of a size where they have to get their act together, and their re-organisation gave them the motivation to do it. Smaller businesses have exactly the same issues, but because they do not produce the same volumes of disposals, they are rarely geared up. They largely remain blissfully unaware of the fates which might befall them.

I am very concerned about this market, the SME, although in reality it is the ME which is of the greatest concern. Your average very small business sorts himself out one way or another, and Genghis Khan, our friendly neighbourhood ICO, very rarely gets involved down there. Medium to large businesses though...they do get in his cross hairs every once in a while.

My opinion is that we need a lot more education to the SME sector. Neither the ICO or any of the other interested parties give clear, concise advice. There is a lot of ‘if you don’t we will smite you’ but very little ‘Responsible Recycling 101’ available. We here in eReco-land are trying to redress that balance and hence the existence of this blog in the first place.

So I did not buy any email addresses. I apologise to my young friend for being a pain in the human recycling bin. I am naturally cantankerous when I don’t feel one hundred per cent, and I have to be nice to customers. That hurts when you have a temperature and a bad throat and a headache.

Charity Begins in...Basingstoke?

I live near a council tip, which is next to a sewage treatment works of all things. In the summer, on the second Tuesday in July when it is always warm enough to have a window open, the stench can be extremely unpleasant. So much for stockbroker belt Surrey! The house may warrant a mansion tax should Red Ed get into power but you can smell the counties pooh!

But until I landed on Planet eReco I had never really considered waste. Now when I visit the tip, as is my wont upon occasion, I look at our rubbish through opened eyes, agog at our wastefulness and at the hoops we now leap through to recycle.

eReco’s fundamental principle is actually 0% landfill. That is what we are about here in sunny East Grinstead. Yes, data security is the other side of the coin, and we take that very seriously indeed, but what we are here to do is to stop stuff getting buried in the ground. Landfills are horrible things. The detritus of human life, the stuff we simply cannot use again, being dug into the good earth.

And yet, although we proclaim 0% landfill loudly and often, it is rarely something that resonates as part of the buying decision. It is almost a given I suppose. People are starting to expect business to be a lighter shade of green. Even though when they go to the supermarket that Avocado is still imprisoned within 6 layers of plastic you need a pair of scissors to get through. Even though we allow hundreds of thousands of tonnes of our WEEE to get sent to African tips every year.

That last one isn’t funny is it? Well neither is the Avocado actually, as you usually slice half a hand off getting it out, only to find out it takes 3 more days to ripen, but the export of WEEE to somewhere where it will end up in landfill is a disgrace.

Shame on us for allowing it to happen.

There are even charities in this country who boast about it. We have given 250000 laptops to schools in Nigeria, or Ghana, or Basingstoke, and aren’t we good. We are sharing our good fortune, thanks to your generosity, and these lovely children with no shoes can post on Facebook that they don’t have anything to eat tonight.

But it’s ok, because someone will earn a pittance helping to bury OUR waste in THEIR land in a few months or so. Because there is no mention of these ‘charities’ bringing the kit back when it breaks down, is there?

I am quite prepared to listen if some of these charitable ventures want to explain to me why this is a good thing. But let’s be clear about what they are actually doing here. They collect your old kit, nearly always for free, promising to remove your data and give you all the paperwork you will ever need, and then ‘donate’ it to those in need across the sea. So quite apart from the tricky problem of how they pay for the collection and processing of your equipment, how do they pay to get it Africa?

The only way this makes sense is if they sell it to someone. As I have said before on this blog that is easy to do, but it is not easy to do legally. I am sure some of it is done legally but I am equally sure that I don’t see how the economics work. As I say, if someone wants to explain it to me, I will be delighted to listen.

I want to see every child in this world owning a pair shoes and getting a good education, even in Basingstoke. No actually especially Basingstoke, because it won't end up in landfill down there. Not to mention healthcare and enough to eat and drink. I am not sure I care whether every child has a second hand laptop however. But I do care about hundreds of thousands of British WEEE ending up in African landfill.

I hope you do too.                         

Who Says You are Good?

Managing risk can be tricky. For instance, did you know that once you let someone collect your old data-bearing devices, you have effectively given your data away? The risk of that is a £500k fine from Genghis Khan, or the ICO, as he prefers to be called.

This is where managing risk and the actual risk itself diverge of course. I am fully prepared to admit that the risk of your old PC falling into the hands of someone who intends to steal your data is fairly slim. Data breaches happen all the time but malicious intent is much rarer, and obviously very few people get fined for this sort of stuff. The ones that do pay dearly of course, both in cash and damaged reputations, but the risk is not massive.

However, managing risk cannot take the gravity of that risk into account. It is very unlikely a child will get seriously injured playing conkers in the school playground but it is still banned. And thus the sensible manager takes data security seriously and selects an IT recycling partner to collect their stuff.

Both the Bar Council and the FCA agree with the ICO that this is the best policy. They also suggest that businesses should consider having their data erased or destroyed BEFORE it leaves the premises in the presence of witnesses. But most people consider a secure process provided by someone like eReco to be sufficient. The risk is managed because we provide waste transfer notes, asset lists and certificates of data destruction to form an audit trail. If the worst happens and the data is lost or stolen, you can stand before Genghis with your hand on heart and say that you managed the risk and point the finger at your supplier.

Except most people do not quite go the whole hog. To manage the risk properly, and follow the advice given, businesses should contract with a suitable recycling partner but only after doing proper due diligence into their service and facilities. They might have told you that they were good, but how do you know? A quick glance at the website and a phone conversation with Arthur Daley does not quite cut it I am afraid.

To be fair here, bigger businesses often do enter into a contractual arrangement and a lot of public entities only do so after the usual tedious procurement process (and yes, it is tedious, it’s been turned into such a process that you spend a lifetime ticking boxes rather than actually spelling out what you can do for what price). But the simple fact is relatively few businesses create enough IT & WEEE to warrant such an arrangement. For the vast majority, it’s a once in a blue moon need, and it does not justify such diligent due diligence.

And yet every business, large or small, needs to manage this particular risk. The risk itself might be slight but the penalties are career-damagingly high. So we here in eReco land try to simplify things for potential customers.

How, I here you ask, not to mention why?

Well how is fairly simple. We are accredited by ADISA, with independent inspections to prove our processes and security. We have ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, and we are registered with the ICO. We have all the recycling licences we need, and we have just been DIPCOG approved to work in the MoD and government space. Very few other companies can boast of that little lot. 3 tops. Out of 800 or so I believe.

Why? Because not everyone can come down to East Grinstead and have a look at us properly. We would welcome you all, despite the cost in Nescafe and Digestive biscuits, but we know you just haven’t got the time, so we seek third party proof that we do what it says on the tin. Of course all of that costs money (...really resisting the temptation to rant about free again...) but it should offer reassurance to prospective clients that we wear brilliant white hats and only shoot when it is really absolutely necessary.

Most responsible businesses, regardless of their sector of operation, seek some sort of third party accreditation, be it a kitemark or just reviews from customers.

Personally, if I don’t see anything of that nature on a website, I am suspicious.

So my advice to you would be ask questions. Test the ground. There is nothing we say that we are not happy to explain, justify or prove. There is nothing we do we will not show you.