How to safely recycle your old Laptop or PC

In theory, once you no longer want your PC, you should be able to return electrical or electronic devices to the shop where you bought them, but that’s easier said than done if you bought your laptop online. What you can’t do is to put a laptop or PC in your household waste. Plus, laptops obviously have batteries which need to be disposed of responsibly. The easiest thing to do is to take the computer to your local recycling facility where it should be put into a dismantler machine which will extract any toxic substances from the devise before shredding it or recycling any reusable parts. Or, if you’re feeling generous, or you don’t think your old laptop or PC is worth much anymore, you can give away a working computer to someone who would benefit from it. Simply advertise your laptop or PC and you’ll quickly get responses from people willing to take it off your hands, right from your front door. 

However there could be a terrifying amount of sensitive personal data stored on your laptop or PC’s hard drive. Passwords, bank account numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and a whole lot more including browsing histories and photos. In fact, simply dumping old PCs and hard disks is a data-security nightmare. One problem with computers is that deleting files doesn’t actually delete the files; it just removes them from the file system’s table of contents. The data is still on the hard drive and, until it is over-written, can be retrieved using an unerase program. Fortunately it can actually be very easy to delete and protect your data from data thieves by physically destroying the hard drive. The best way to do this is by also taking your hard drive to the recycling facility where it can be shredded and then recycled. 

Manchester Shredding offer a Free Computer Recycling service, for PC, laptop and tablets, where you can now deliver your old IT and computer equipment to our warehouse where we will dispose of it correctly and safely in line with best environmental practice. 

Click the links below for more information on how Manchester Shredding can safely dispose and recyle your old computer or laptop to protect against personal data fraud.

Computer recycling
Hard drive destruction

Source: The guardian and Tech advisor 
https://www.theguardian.com
https://www.techadvisor.co.uk