THE TURTLE GETS GREENER WITH ISO CERTIFICATION

THE TURTLE GETS GREENER WITH ISO CERTIFICATION

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Having seen dumps of used and broken electronics in third-world countries, the founder of Turtle Wings Electronics Recycling vowed to create a company that dealt with e-waste in a globally responsible manner. Elizabeth Wilmot has held tightly to that goal in the 5 ½ years that Turtle Wings has been in business by carefully vetting all of the downstream vendors and buyers. Turtle Wings has always insured that all harmful materials are properly dealt with here in the U.S.

“We are delighted to announce that we are now ISO 14001 certified. We felt it was important to be ISO certified as it shows we have a documented Environmental Health and Safety Management System and can trace all of our materials at all times. Our EHSMS is based on the R2 standards as issued by the EPA. There seem to be more and more ‘so-called’ recyclers cropping up who make unsubstantiated claims about where and how their material actually gets recycled. The ISO certification is an important accreditation which clearly differentiates our company,” said Wilmot.

 “The ISO 14001 certification process took a lot of hours to complete and a lot of documentation. The reality is, however, that we have had these systems in place from the inception of the company,” said George Bartlett, Compliance Manager. “The very foundation of Turtle Wings’ operations was built on a green initiative. This step of being ISO certified brings public recognition to our environmentally responsible practices. This profound commitment to the environment has always set us apart from our competitors,” added Bartlett.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is the international-standard-setting body that promulgates worldwide proprietary industrial and commercial standard in 163 countries. The ISO 14001 certification is the best known international standard designed to certify the environmental management system used by an organization to minimize its effects on the environment. These standards provide a framework for organizations to identify and control EH&S incidents and implement a systematic approach to setting EH&S objectives and targets, achieve those targets and highlight the success that has been achieved. Continual improvement measurements and standards are an important piece of this certification.

Interesting article from datakillers

THE END OF LIFE DILEMMA OF SOLID-STATE HARD DRIVES

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The End-of-Life Dilemma of Solid State Drives

Data Killers, a nationwide destruction company specializing in on-site shredding of hard drives, tapes, products and equipment, uses industry research and a review of the University of California San Diego’s study of solid state hard drives to recommend the best practices for destroying solid state hard drives.

The use of solid state hard drives (SSDs) is growing in popularity over the use of hard disk drives (HDDs).  SSDs use NAND flash memory to read/write data as opposed to the spinning platters used in HDDs.  SSDs have better performance with lower access time and latency.  SSDs work so well at storing data that it is difficult to erase these drives.  Many standard sanitizing techniques that are used on HDDs are not as effective on SSDs, primarily because of the SSDs’ use of flash memory.

The flash memory used by SSDs (and indeed in all storage that uses flash memory, such as USB drives) is used in a write-once, read-many-times, erase cycle. The write/read part of the cycle operates on 4KB pages, but the erase part operates on 128KB blocks. The problem with flash memory is that the erase process is slightly destructive, with two results: first, that each block has a limited life-span, and second, the controller will preferentially copy existing pages of data elsewhere on the drive rather than cause blocks to be erased. This means that frequently updated data is necessarily duplicated across the drive.

Studies on reliable methods of erasing SSDs performed at the University of California San Diego have also arrived at the conclusion that reliable SSD sanitization can be difficult to achieve. Since SSDs are so difficult to erase, technology professionals are faced with the dilemma of how to securely dispose of SSDs at the end of their life-cycle.  Degaussing techniques are not effective because SSDs do not use magnetic formatting.

In order to guarantee secured disposal of the drive, to comply with corporate and government data destruction mandates, SSDs must be shredded to tiny pieces. 10mm (about the size of a dime) seems to be the accepted industry standard except for classified SSDs which must be dealt with in accordance with NSA/CSS declassified procedures.  Shredding to 10mm is also the industry standard for other solid state storage devices like: Random Access Memory, Read Only Memory, Field-Programmable Gate Array, Flash Memory, and Smart Cards.

Data Killers provides nationwide, on-site destruction of any type of equipment or media with assured compliance and the ability to shred material to 10mm or as small as 2mm sizes (with advanced notification). Data Killers is the data and product destruction arm of Turtle Wings, Inc., an ISO certified, woman-owned, HUBZoned company holding multiple GSA contracts.

For more information contact our office at  301-583-8399 or visit http://datakillers.com

For recycling eletronics check out http://turtlewings.com

Recycling and why being green can bite you in the butt.

A company recently donated a group of old computers to the library near us as part of its going green process. The owner came and gave a speech about the importance protecting the environment and how the computers would do more good there then in a dump pile.

About a month later the company received a lawsuit. Seems that there had been a data leak. The company hired down one to track down the source and low and behold someone had managed to pull ups some old documents off one of the computers. 

Don't get me wrong going green is great, but make sure you take the proper steps with electronics. 

more information on data destruction and Pc disposal at

http://datakillers.com

http://turtlewings.com

Interesting article about the importance of data destruction

You don’t want ‘60 Minutes’ or ABC News to come knocking at your door because one of your employees threw away a laptop.  You don’t want to be reading the front page of the Wall Street Journal and see that your confidential business plan is now public information.  You certainly don’t want to lose the confidence of your customer base because of one improperly discarded Blackberry.  At the end of the day, all you have is your brand name and your reputation.

It is very important to consider information security from a hardware point of view. What happens to data when you get rid of old computers?  Did you consider the information stored on smart phones and copier hard drives the last time you upgraded?  How can sensitive information from that data be used against you if your electronics are not disposed of properly? If you work for a large corporation or government office, one errantly trashed computer could mean much more than having someone’s dating profile or resume available to the public.

To the chagrin of many, this has been an ongoing trend for careless companies and government offices.  There are hundreds of accounts where sensitive information is collected from old electronics. Data thieves are becoming evermore efficient in extracting useful data from discarded computers and handheld devices.  Not only have these cases resulted in costly lawsuits against companies by customers whose privacy was compromised, but consumer confidence was adversely affected.

If you want to avoid adding your name to this list, there are several measures that you can take to help protect yourself and your information.  In the world ofdata destruction, these include:

Wiping – “Wiping” a hard drive refers to using specialized software to purge a drive of all accessible data.  The upside to this method is that the device is still usable after the process because nothing has affected the hardware.

Unfortunately, this process is extremely time-consuming and prone to human error when many systems require wiping.  In addition, the software cannot guarantee the erasure of data on a damaged or corrupted sector of the hard drive. Additionally, the only way to prove that all the data has been deleted is to reinsert the drive into a computer, reboot the system, and manually confirm.    Very, very time consuming!

Degaussing – Degaussing involves a process where a hard drive is exposed to a high powered magnetic field which changes the alignment of the magnetic domain where the data is stored, thus “erasing” the data.  When functioning properly, the process of degaussing can effectively render a hard drive useless and free of any previously stored data.

The problem with this technique is that, again, the process is lengthy and subject to operator error.  A degaussed hard drive is visibly indistinguishable from one that hold sensitive data.  This is a serious problem when several hundred hard drives need to be degaussed at one time.    In addition, if the degausser does not run at full cycle strength, there is the possibility for some data to remain on the hard drive.

Shredding – Shredding is the safest option for data destruction.  The hard drive or device is physically shredded into tiny particles.

There are two substantial benefits to choosing shredding.  First, nationally recognized hard drive shredding service providers use 30 mm screens or smaller, which means that your entire device will be completely destroyed and no information can be extracted from any residual components.  Second, the process is quick and irrefutable. You can choose to watch it happen either in person or by live camera feed so you can be assured that all your items have been dealt with. Finally, the residue can be sent to a certified smelter.  Knowing for certain that your hard drives (and whatever information might have been left on them) are turned into dust ensures peace of mind for you and your office.

Although there are different options for handling your data destruction needs, shredding is the only sure-fire solution of guaranteeing that your sensitive information never ends up the in the wrong hands.

For more information on this topic – please visit http://www.DATAKILLERS.com

Data Killers provides nationwide, on-site destruction of any type of equipment or media with assured compliance and the ability to shred material to 10mm or as small as 2mm sizes. Data Killers is the data and product destruction arm of Turtle Wings, Inc., an ISO certified, woman-owned, HUBZoned company holding multiple GSA contracts.