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.

Eggs are bloody Eggs

I am having a bit of a go at the charity sector this week. You may have noticed. I also had a pop at Basingstoke purely for fun along the way. So here I go again whilst in the grip of man flu. If a charity collects your old WEEE, as some do, who pays for the collection? Who provides the (necessary) paperwork? Yes, you’ve got it again, someone is being conned here.

It may be the poor sap who has volunteered to collect your stuff using his own petrol and his very clean Volvo. It’s clean because he polishes it every Saturday morning of clourse, and he probably has a blanket in the back to protect his carpet from your disgusting IT waste. I am sure he was very nice, polite and helpful, but he is breaking the law. So are you by the way. I think. Let me explain.

Well, for a start, this is waste. You are throwing something out, for free, and that makes it waste. In this country, to transport WEEE, you have to have the right licenses and paperwork, and our nice OAP with the Volvo should be providing you with a Waste Transfer Note. Some of the stuff he is taking from you may well be classified as hazardous. Monitors for instance are so classified, as are laptops because of the screens. So if he is caught transporting it without the paperwork you are caught disposing of your WEEE illegally. Fined, send them down bailiff, next case.

Ok, this is probably not the most serious crime in the world, and the chances of you falling foul of it are pretty slim, but I just thought you should know. And the Volvo driver should know too. His insurance almost certainly will not cover him for his bit of charity work.

But isn’t this clever? Now our charity has your old PC back at the ranch. For nothing. And having made no specific promises on how they will eradicate your data from the equation, what they do is use either a ripped off (and therefore ever more out of date) version of decent software, or use one of the products available off the shelf which are ok but not fail safe. I say ok, because I cannot deny they wipe disks and put a zero in every cell, but this is retrievable. It is not totally safe because it can be recovered. You will have to decide whether this is good enough for you, and whether the ICO will agree that, in the event of a data breach, you have done enough to protect your data. The fine is only £500k.

Our software is bang up to date Infosec 5 rated software from Tabernus. This does three wipes with total random combinations of 0’s and 1’s. It rejects any hard drive that has damaged cells which cannot be overwritten (and we destroy them) and there is no known way to retrieve data after this process. Says who I hear you cry? Says GCHQ and the FBI, that’s who. And we pay a license fee for every hard drive we wipe.

But back to the charity. Now they have your computer, for zero cost, and they have wiped it for zero cost, a depth of service which should help you all to sleep well at night. So what do they do with it all now?

Well, some must carry on down our road and remarket it, for cash. EBay. Maybe they sell as job lots to brokers, but legitimate brokers are very choosy. They only take what they know there is a market for. I would estimate that the average price for an old desktop is under £50, and this figure is only so high because a good machine, with a high specification, can still be worth hundreds. If we took them out of the equation, your bog standard 3 year old PC is worth maybe £25 tops.

Now when you have shelled out precisely nothing that is really not so bad, I suppose. The charity has turned your rubbish into £25 with the help of a willing volunteer, and you’ve got a service of sorts. You might even get a certificate of data destruction I suppose. Maybe, maybe not. But for 99.99% of people this is job done, no come backs, you think you have done a good thing for the world and the charity, good bad or indifferent, has £25 to do whatever good it says it will do.

The other scenario is that they do not flog the PC entirely legitimately in this country. Instead they flog it to some bloke who gets it from them when the shed is full. He takes everything and pays a nice lump sum. Say £200 a pallet. This is great because Del-boy doesn’t really care if it all works or not. He just loads it all up, counts out the notes and disappears.

And this is the stuff that really annoys me, because this is the stuff that goes to Africa and will end up in landfill, as sure as eggs are eggs. And eggs are bloody eggs you know. Even if a charity is sending stuff to Africa legitimately, to help a school or whatever, and this is authorised, when this stuff packs up it is not going to be sent back to Tunbridge Wells is it? Now the people behind European WEEE regulations, the Environment Agency and such like, ought to be seriously dischuffed about this sort of stuff...and guess what, they are. There is even an EA taskforce trying to catch the people who do this under the counter, and I sincerely hope that the people who authorise the legal export of used IT equipment are considering landfill too.

Once again, I must emphasise that I am not against charity. Not legitimate ones. If they are fully authorised to send this stuff abroad, I may not like it but all I can do is write letters of complaint and campaign against it. But a lot of charities are fronts with profit making businesses behind them. A lot of them are not doing what they say they are doing. And whilst they are (allegedly) lining their own pockets, they are risking your data and ruining this planet for our children.

I am against that. How about you?

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.

Don’t Messi Around, Grab a Bargain!

Lionel Messi has a contract release clause of £200m allegedly. He is still young...he has enough miles in him to justify the fee. And who wouldn’t pay to see the little maestro...as long as he isn’t plying his trade at Stamford Bridge at any rate.

My point is that everyone and everything has a price. And you can sell anything these days. We have eBay and other auction sites whilst Facebook is full of local selling pages. As long as your expectation is not too high I reckon you could offload most things if the price is right.

For me, the second hand market for electrical goods came as something of a surprise. I had never really thought about it I suppose. I am not gadget mad and my stuff tends to be with me until it dies a natural death. I only got a new TV when my huge, incredibly heavy year 2000 model failed to cope with wide screen broadcasting. I was watching football matches and never seeing the ball hit the back of the net. I did try but I literally could not give it away.

And I never thought of going for a second hand TV. Why would anyone replace a TV set that still worked and coped with wide screen sporting events? It did not compute. But I have to say my next computer will be second hand. I do not game. I do not download video or indeed music to my computer at home and I do not need loads of storage or memory. I like Facebook, I use Microsoft Word and Excel a lot, and I do a little light emailing at home. State of the art is therefore not that important to me, as long as the internet loads fairly rapidly.

Luckily for companies like eReco, other people are rather quicker on the uptake than me. Keeping costs down is important for small businesses and remarketed, refurbished equipment is one way to save some money. That is why old operating systems live on much longer than Bill Gates would probably like. Well, that and the fact that Windows 8 is an abomination of course. One hopes Windows 10 will be an improvement, but ones breath is not being held!

If you or anyone you know is looking for cost-effective options for your business, or indeed home, it makes sense to check out sites like www.ereco.co.uk in case we have what you need. You can pick up tested working kit for a fraction of the cost of new and if you get a year or two out of it you will be as pleased as punch, and a sustainability king (or queen) to boot.