Paper
For guidance on compliant secure document disposal practices, most businesses and organizations look to federal regulations, such as HIPAA and FACTA. But the State of California has long had a record for enacting its own consumer and environmental protection laws that go above and beyond what most states require. The same is true for the laws governing how businesses handle personal information and sensitive documents.
If you’d like to read the entire California civil code yourself, you can do so online. But we thought we’d save you some time by pulling out a few salient lines that pertain to privacy, document security and your business. Take note of these important reminders from the law.
If Personal Information is Compromised, You’re Responsible
California Civil Code Section 1798.81 says that a business must take “all reasonable steps” to dispose or arrange for the disposal of all documents containing personal information by means of “(a) shredding, (b) erasing, or (c) otherwise modifying the personal information in those records to make it unreadable or undecipherable through any means.” (Emphasis added.)
That last bit is particularly important. Instead of laying out specifically how obscured the data has to be (i.e. cross cut, ribbon cut, formatted), California law says that it must be completely unreadable by any means. So, even if you shred a document into tiny fragments and someone comes along and pieces it back together or uses special scanning software to digitally restore it, you’re responsible, in spite of your good intentions. The same is true if a third party digs old hard drives out of the trash and uses data recovery software to extract personal information from it.
The lesson: err on the side of caution. Don’t underestimate the persistence of identity thieves, and don’t stop anywhere short of completely eradicating your data.
Compromised Electronic Data Equals Bad PR and High Costs
California Civil Code Section 1798.82 states that any breach of the security of a system containing personal data must be disclosed to all California residents whose information may have been compromised as soon as the breach is detected. While this law typically applies to servers which have been hacked, it holds true for hard drives which may have fallen into the wrong hands. The law states that you must send an electronic or written notice to each person who may have been affected by the security breach. Given that a hard drive can hold hundreds of thousands of records, that’s a lot of letters and emails! According to the law, if the costs of sending out a notice exceeds $250,000, then you can notify the public via a prominent notice on your website or via a major statewide media outlet.
At any rate, even if no one’s identity is stolen and no other adverse impacts result from the security breach, such as a box full of used hard drives being stolen off the back of a truck on its way to the landfill, you’re facing a potential PR nightmare. Publicly announcing that your servers or data systems were compromised can shake the confidence of existing or potential customers that you will be a good steward of the sensitive data, and that can be bad for business in the long run.
The Law is Not on Your Side
The California state legislature takes privacy concerns seriously, and their number one priority is protecting the personal information of individuals, not cutting businesses a break. That sentiment is summed up in the opening line of California Civil Code Section 1798.81.5, which says: “It is the intent of the Legislature to ensure that personal information about California residents is protected.”
The lesson: You won’t get much sympathy from the court if it comes down to a legal action. Your best defense is a well documented record of your due diligence, including dates when documents and digital media was destroyed and a Certificate of Destruction indicating the time, place and manner of destruction.
We can help you cover those bases and more with our mobile shredding services. From hard drives and DVDs to file boxes and office papers, we can shred all of your sensitive documents to the point of unreadability by any means on-site.
Call Go Green Mobile Shredding at (877) 821-0217 for more information.
It feels good to see less paper in the trash can. And one of the ways that many offices and households are cutting back on paper is by going digital with their records, shopping lists and, of course, their correspondences. But is going paperless actually good for the environment?
The short answer to that question is: Yes. Of the three R’s of waste hierarchy, reduce is number one, followed by reuse and recycle. Using less paper means fewer trees are harvested, less energy is consumed and less landfill space is used for the production and disposal of paper products. But that’s not the whole story.
Implicit in the noble cause to use less paper is the assumption that digital media is more sustainable than paper. That is only partially true. While each email you read on your computer or smartphone doesn’t amount to a sheet of paper in the recycling bin, the impact on the environment is far from zero. Think of your digital media—including hard drives, floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, tape drives, CompactFlash cards, SD cards, thumbdrives, etc.—as pieces of paper that you can use and reuse thousands upon thousands of times before it wears out. But what happens when it does?
If you end up tossing your laptops, cell phones, computer monitors, old projectors and other electronic equipment into the dumpster, you may be undoing most or all of the environmental benefits you’ve realized by saving paper. Not to mention that in California, you’d be breaking the law. That’s because electronic waste—more commonly referred to as e-waste—is even more dangerous and harmful to the environment than paper. E-waste contains heavy metals and other toxic components that leech into the ground and contaminate ecological habitats and water sources. In the U.S., an estimated 30 million computers are discarded each year, with only 15 to 20 percent of the nation’s e-waste being recycled, according to the EPA. Californians Against Waste estimates that about 70 percent of all heavy metals found in landfills comes from e-waste.
The moral of the story: Yes, go paperless. Reuse scrap paper from the copier and of, course shred and recycle your office paper. But don’t forget to recycle your e-waste, too.
At Go Green Mobile Shredding, we can help you securely and sustainably dispose of all of your electronic waste. We can shred your hard drives right in your parking lot and issue a Certificate of Destruction for your peace mind. We can also take computer towers, monitors, laptops, cell phones and other e-waste off your hands and make sure that it’s recycled in an environmentally-friendly fashion.
Thanks for doing your part for the planet!
P.S. Also, remember that electronics use electricity—much of which is sourced from unsustainably mined coal. Cutting back on electricity usage and supporting clean energy are key components of making digital media greener.
Paper waste makes up a massive amount of what ends up in our landfills each year. Not only that, the paper making process—which involves heavy machinery to cultivate trees, more heavy machinery to harvest them, trucks to haul them to the pulping factory and tons of industrial waste to process the wood into paper—has a significant impact on our air, water and land resources. Offices can play a large role in lessening the environmental implications of paper use by following three key principles: reduce, reuse, recycle.
Reduce Your Paper Use
Email and other electronic communication have gone a long way in reducing intra-office paper use. But if you’re still circulating hard copies of memos, distributing thick packets for projects and posting flyers throughout the office, there’s still much progress to be made. Unnecessary printing and copying also accounts for a vast amount of paper use in an office, and by centralizing your printing, rather than assigning each department its own printer, you can help reduce waste and boost efficiency. Assign an administrative assistant or department head as a gatekeeper to the printer and employees will think twice about printing out a document—plus, when they do need a big job done, the menial work will be handed off to someone more suited to the job, so they can focus on what they are best at.
Reuse Office Paper
For non-sensitive documents, the blank backside of a sheet is an obvious opportunity for reusing paper. Keep a stack or basket for paper with one-side printed and either feed it back into a printer for internal use or keep it in the conference room for use as scratch paper. Scratch paper is just as handy as a notepad for taking down notes for meetings and it’ll cost you less overall.
Recycle Instead of Discarding
Recycling enjoyed a brief heyday before the risk of identity theft and strict HIPAA and FACTA requirements put a damper on the practice. When it comes to saving the Earth versus protecting your company from liability and your clients from identity theft, many office managers opt for shredding and disposal, rather than risking a document becoming compromised at the recycling facility. But with on-site mobile shredding, you can have the best of both worlds. Go Green Mobile Shredding can come straight to your door to destroy your sensitive and non-sensitive documents right before your eyes. Then, we’ll haul it to a certified recycling facility so it can be sustainably processed.
When it comes to going green at the office, a few simple steps can go a long way. For more information on how Go Green Mobile Shredding can help your office reduce its ecological footprint, give us a call.
Paper Recycling Impact
You may have heard statistics claiming that logging companies plant more trees than they harvest each year. But factoids like this are misleading, especially in light of the impacts that “planted forests” used primarily for paper production have on our environment. When timber enterprises plant trees, the goal is not the re-establishment of natural habitats. Instead, old growth forests are replaced with a single species of fast growing, high yield trees. Such monoculture forests cannot sustain biodiversity. Also, since they are intended for harvest, these trees do not provide the benefits of terrestrial carbon sequestration (i.e. when trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by absorbing it). For these reasons and others, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) has come to characterize tree monocultures not as forests, but “green deserts.” According to WRM, tree plantations also compete for land and water resources with local villagers, making it difficult for indigenous peoples to secure drinking water and raise crops for food.
Closer to home, an initiative spearheaded by the Stop GE Trees Campaign, Global Justice Ecology Project and the Dogwood Alliance has raised awareness about the possible impacts of genetically engineered eucalyptus trees being planted in several states across the U.S. Eucalyptus trees are wildly invasive and can spread into native ecosystems and displace wildlife. The oil in eucalyptus trees is also highly flammable. Their pervasiveness contributes to rampant forest fire problems throughout California. As such, the members of the Stop GE Trees Campaign have filed a suit seeking to bar ArborGen from moving forward with its plans for several plantations composed of genetically modified eucalyptus trees.
While the costs vs. benefits of tree plantations are highly controversial, one thing is clear: an acre of cultivated trees is not equivalent to an acre of old growth forest or rainforest. Because the implications of replacing diverse, natural habitats with tree monocultures are not yet fully understood, it’s prudent for our society to lessen our reliance on forests planted for harvesting.
To this end, paper recycling can play a large role. According to the National Recycling Coalition, one tree is saved for each three-foot high stack of newspapers that is recycled. At Go Green Mobile Shredding, our mobile shredding trucks can shred up to 3 tons (6,000 pounds) of paper in a single hour. We haul all of our paper to a certified recycling facility where it’s saved from the landfill and put to sustainable use. Imagine how many trees your office could save in a year!
For more information on paper recycling and mobile shredding, call Go Green Mobile Shredding at (877) 821-0217.
Businesses today are becoming more and more conscientious about diverting waste from landfills. A big part of this effort includes recycling eWaste, such as computers, cell phones, printers, hard drives and other electronics. But have you ever wondered what really happens to your computers and hard drives once you turn them over to an e-recycler?
The sad fact is that a vast majority of eWaste produced in the U.S. is shipped overseas. That’s because our federal government strictly bans unsustainable eWaste processing methods that harm people and the environment. As such, unscrupulous e-recyclers find it more profitable to simply export unprocessed eWaste to countries in Africa and Asia that don’t have laws that protect laborers and ecosystems. These nations are home to global dumping grounds for eWaste from developed nations which prohibit unsustainable disposal practices. Oftentimes, child laborers end up picking through jagged mountains of eWaste, salvaging the valuable components. Circuit boards and electronics are cooked, burned or processed using acrid chemicals in order to remove the precious metals, creating noxious fumes which are inhaled by workers and released into the atmosphere.
Another industry that arises from the dark side of e-recycling is organized identity theft. Brokers in the U.S. collect large shipments of hard drives, printers, cell phones and digital media, which they sell to brokers. Identity thieves can buy entire lots of hard drives from these eWaste brokers. They then systematically sift through the purchased hard drives using data recovery software in order to extract Social Security numbers, bank account details, medical records and credit card numbers—even if the data has been deleted from the drive.
So, what’s the solution? Simple: on-site mobile hard drive destruction and certified eWaste recycling. The only way you can be assured that your hard drives never fall into the wrong hands is to have it shredded right before your eyes. At Go Green Mobile Shredding, we can come to your office door and destroy your hard drives beyond recoverability right in your parking lot. We’ll issue you a Certificate of Destruction so you can document your due diligence in protecting the confidential data of your clients and your company. After we shred your hard drive, we’ll bring it directly to a certified recycling center right here in California, guaranteeing that it won’t wind up in a landfill or in an unsafe, unsustainable eWaste heap in a third world country.
Give us a call at (877) 821-0217 to find out how easy it is to be a good steward of your eWaste, thanks to Go Green Mobile Shredding.
(For more information on overseas eWaste processing, see the PBS interview with Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, an environment al group that raised awareness about the Guiyu eWaste village.)
