When computers or other electronic equipment become obsolete and must be disposed of, it is important to reuse or recycle them. Disposing of computers properly can reduce pollution and energy use.

The electronic equipment contains valuable resources such as gold, palladium, copper and other foreign elements of the Earth. They also contain lead, mercury and cadmium, which if they come into contact with groundwater or are incinerated, have harmful effects on health and the environment.

Safety first

Before discarding our computers we must ensure that the confidential information it contains must be permanently deleted from the storage unit, but not before making a backup of all the files we want to keep.

After deleting the information from our storage unit, we must leave it completely unrecoverable, we cannot just throw away the hard disk and trust that the information is not accessible, we must take the necessary measures to ensure that the information has been correctly deleted.

There are different ways to clean your hard drive or SSD, you can fiscally destroy the hard drive, hiring a certified company, to take care of this, but with this we ensure that nothing can be recovered.

You can also purchase software to overwrite the information on our hard drives before discarding them.

We must ensure that the software we use complies with the 5220.22M standard of the Department of Defense, in this way we will be sure that the information will be unrecoverable.

Reuse IT equipment

Not all equipment that we no longer use frequently is entirely disposable, if the equipment still works we can assign it for other tasks. A hard disk can be completely cleaned and reusable as an external storage unit, both for the backups we need to make or simply for additional storage.

An old computer can also be converted into a home server to allow you to connect household electronics as transmission devices to your network.

Computer donation

If the computer equipment we plan to dispose of, can still be used, we must evaluate the possibility of donating it. There are many places that these devices can use. Contact the charity of your choice to find out what requirements they ask to donate reusable computer equipment.

Recycle my computers

In some cases, computers and components can be taken to a nonprofit organization and then sold or recycled.

In some communities there are places where you can take electronic equipment to dispose of them safely, be sure to investigate places and schedules for recycling our computers.

It is never a good idea to mix electronic devices with common garbage, since as we mentioned the components they contain harm the environment.

Remember that some components of these devices can also be valuable for someone else.