Recycle Safely

Posted in: Security, blog by CW on 30 December 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Did Santa bring you a new fax machine or computer for Christmas? Are you planning on recycling or donating your old machine?

Here are a couple of security-related issues for your consideration.

Fax machines that use a film, as opposed to an ink or toner cartridge, retain an image of every fax the machine has reproduced. Think of the film as a long roll of carbon paper (those of you, like me, old enough to remember carbon paper). A perfectly readable image of every received fax is preserved on that roll of film. A discarded fax film is a goldmine for identity thieves.

We strongly recommend you destroy the used fax film. However, we have not yet identified the most effective way to do that. I’m not sure that feeding it through a paper shredder would work; in fact it may jam the cutting teeth of the shredder. Burning it is probably not an option, at least in the incorporated parts of San Diego. If your business uses the services of a document destruction company, I would suggest adding your fax roll to the bags of documents awaiting destruction. If that is not an option, perhaps soaking the roll of film in a can of gasoline or bleach will make it unreadable.

If anyone can offer a better or more practical solution, please let us all know in the comments.

It is perhaps more obvious that if you plan on recycling your old computer, you should first remove and then destroy the hard drive, unless you plan on using that drive again in your new computer or as an external drive (cases for this can be purchased from retailers like geeks.com for less than $20).

What may not be as obvious is that simply deleting the content on your hard drive isn’t sufficient. It’s not all that hard to reconstruct deleted data from a hard drive.

This is because when you delete something, you aren’t actually erasing that content. You’re merely erasing the marker that tells the operating system where to find that data on the disk. It’s as if you removed all the house numbers from a block of houses. The houses are still there but an individual house would now be hard to find if all you had to go on was the address. Forensic software can even recover data that has been over-written. There are software companies that sell applications that promise to delete your data “to military specifications”. Sounds pretty good, but the military doesn’t have a single set of specifications for data destruction.

• Clearing: Eradicating data to the extent that information cannot be retrieved through normal operation but may be salvaged in a laboratory.

•Sanitizing/purging: Removing data to a degree that it is beyond the reach of all ordinary and most laboratory recovery methods. This includes degaussing, which employs a special coil tool to demagnetize a drive’s magnetic media, scrambling all contents in the disk.

•Destroying: Disintegrate, incinerate, pulverize, shred, or melt.

Software and/or hardware can perform either of the first two types of deletion, but why spend $30 or more when you can perform that last type of data destruction yourself? All you need is a hammer. The other advantage to this technique is that it’s a great stress reliever. Remove the hard drive from the computer, place it on concrete or some other resistant material and smash the case as much as you can. Your goal is to break the disks inside the case. That should make the drive completely unreadable by even the most advanced forensic software. Then the drive should be safe to recycle with other electronics.

One last suggestion for protecting your information as 2010 rolls around: I know several people who celebrate New Years by shredding all their old paperwork, receipts, bills and correspondence. They keep 3-5 years of archived paperwork and everything older gets shredded. But even shredded paper can be reconstructed by someone determined to do so. If you throw shredded documents out in the trash, consider pouring some liquid into the bag with it to cause the ink to run and make each strip harder to read, or use that bag for used kitty litter. Put the trash out just before pickup to deny someone the chance to get access to it. In most states, once you put your trash can on the curb you no longer have property rights over it. Anyone can go through your trash looking for personal data that will let them borrow your identity.

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Recycling is great, but reusing might be better

Posted in: Reduce-Reuse-Recycle, blog by CW on 28 December 2009

In our daily lives reuse is often more practical and more beneficial than tossing items in the recycling bin. The following article from NorthJersey.com explains the benefits of reuse and provides easy ways to practice it.

After decades of emphasizing recycling, environmental advocates and climate-change experts are now shifting their focus a bit: Instead of tossing used receptacles into a recycling bin — where it takes energy to haul them away and even more to process them into new products — they’re stressing it’s better to use them again and again.

The concept is not new. Environmental advocates’ mantra has always been “reduce, reuse, recycle” — but now there is a growing emphasis on reducing by reusing items more than once.

That not only means bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, but also using cloth napkins instead of paper, turning old clothes into cleaning rags, and instead of buying prepackaged deli snacks for lunch, sending children to school with a sandwich in a container that can be used over and over.

“You use 90 percent less energy to take an aluminum can and make it into a new can through recycling than if you had to mine bauxite to make aluminum and make a new can, so recycling is still important,” said Jeff Tittel, director of New Jersey Sierra Club. “But reuse has become much more the environmental trend for a lot of people because you don’t need to use the energy for recycling.”

“One by one, what we buy, or how we buy things, will make a difference,” Tittel said. “So by reusing canvas bags, it means you are not using oil and other things to make plastic bags that are not going to spend an eternity in a landfill.

By reusing containers it saves on energy, it saves on our carbon footprint and it saves in landfills, which also cause a lot of pollution. So it’s a good, simple way to lower your carbon footprint and help the environment.”

Other solutions are just as simple.

Stop serving bottled water at catered events and public meetings, suggests Randall Solomon, executive director of the Sustainable State Institute at Rutgers University. Instead, put out pitchers of water to serve in glasses.

“You don’t have to be super radical to make a huge difference,” Solomon said.

One of the recommendations in a greenhouse-gas report released last week by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection also emphasizes the need to reduce and reuse — not only recycle.

“The more scientific information that we get, we are realizing the importance of reduce and reuse along with recycling,” said DEP spokeswoman Elaine Makatura.

So before you recycle, consider if the item you’re getting rid of could possibly be reused.

Do you have other suggestions for ways in which we can better practice reuse? If so, please mention them in the comments.

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Font selection effects ink conservation

Posted in: Conservation, Recycling, Tips & Tricks, blog by CW on 19 December 2009

Did you ever think that the font you select to print with could effect the number of pages a cartridge can deliver?

Obviously printing a great deal of bold characters on a page will use more ink, but it is also true that the font you use may consume more ink than another font.

Matt Robinson, in collaboration with Tom Wrigglesworth, found a unique way to illustrate the amount of ink each popular font uses. Granted, they are using ink pens to conduct their experiment, but the results are equally applicable to inkjet printing.

A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface. (Source-matthewrobinson.com)

Click through for images.

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Christmas Eve Hours

Posted in: blog, store by CW on 14 December 2009

Just a reminder that we close early on Christmas Eve to allow our staff members to enjoy the evening home with their families. We are closed on Christmas Day and reopen on Saturday, December 26th with our usual weekend hours of 10am-5pm.

Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th)…9am-2pm

Christmas Day  (Dec. 25th)…Closed

Christmas Recovery Day (Dec. 26th)…10am-5pm

Upcoming Recycling Event @ Recycle San Diego

Posted in: Recycling, blog by CW on

FREE eWASTE DROP OFF EVENT – SAN DIEGO
Saturday, December 19, 2009
10am-2pm
Recycle San Diego Parking Lot
8222 Ronson Road, San Diego, CA 92111

Recycle San Diego is hosting a FREE electronics recycling event which is open to the general public. Bring any amount of eWASTE to have it recycled for free.

Do you need to find a place on your desk for your new printer or wonder what to do with that 3 year old computer? Drop them off at Recycle San Diego this coming Saturday.

Please read their website carefully to see what they will and won’t accept. Also note that businesses are charged for this service, so despite the site saying that “any amount” of eWaste is accepted, too much of any one item may result in your paying for recycling.

Still, this is a far better solution than dumping your unwanted electronics in the trash.

Rethinking Recycling

Posted in: Recycling, blog by CW on 7 December 2009

No, not in general. We still encourage everyone to recycle, reuse, reduce and, especially at this time of year, regift.

What we do have to rethink is our offer to recycle our customer’s printers, faxes, computers and monitors for them. We wanted to provide this service as a free way to ensure your electronics were recycled properly.  We would take customer’s unwanted, unneeded and broken electronics then, when we got to around 20 devices, we would call a local agency to pick them up. We worked with agencies that used the printers to train people in repair and then supplied the working machines to low-income and military families.

Unfortunately the number of agencies involved in this effort is shrinking, and those that remain are getting more selective about what they’ll accept. For instance, the Salvation Army will only take computers less than 4 years old, the very type of machine unlikely to be offered for recycling.

We thought we’d found the perfect partner in our efforts to keep printers and computers out of the landfill in a local company called Recycle San Diego. I just posted about a weekend drive they were having for electronics. That’s where I took all our accumulated printers Saturday.

Evidently this reoccurring drive is free to households, people who have a printer or a computer they want to recycle.  When you pull in like I did with 20+ printers in the back of your truck you’re considered a business (fair enough, we are, after all) and businesses pay 20¢ a pound to recycle printers. So recycling our customer’s printers Saturday cost us $20.

Had our customers brought their own printers to Recycle San Diego on Saturday instead of bringing them to our store, they would have been able to freely recycle them.

So as much as I regret doing anything that might in any way discourage recycling, from this point on we are going to start encouraging our customers to take their electronics directly to Recycle San Diego on the weekends they hold their drives and not to bring them to us. This will ensure the electronics get recycled without costing either of us anything.

I’ll make a point to post upcoming recycling drives in advance and will have that information available in the store. We want to encourage everyone to properly dispose of their unwanted electronics, we just can’t afford to subsidize that effort every month.

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Upcoming e-waste recycling events

Posted in: Recycling, blog by CW on 2 December 2009

Our friends at Recycle San Diego are continuing to host e-waste recycling events.

You can keep up on all their future recycling drives by visiting their website.

We encourage you to take any electronics you no longer need or use to this event and allow them to be properly recycled.