1. Try using your coffee grounds as plant fertilizer. Mix the grounds loosely into the soil surrounding your plants or even sprinkle them directly on your lawn. Cold coffee can even be used directly on potted plants indoors. The grounds contain useful nutrients like Nitrogen, Calcium, Potassium, Phosphorus, Magnesium, and Sulfur and can even help keep bugs away from sensitive plants.
2. Use grounds to scour greasy pots and pans.
3. Dry the grounds completely and fill up an old stocking or breathable sack. Use this as an odor absorber in cabinets, cupboards, or refrigerator.
4. Use the coffee sludge from your filter as a wood stain. Mix in more or less water depending on the darkness of the wood.
5. Use as a beauty supplement. Mix grounds with egg and apply to the face. Let dry, then rinse with warm water. The concoction will gently firm and tone, minimize pores, as well as scrub off dead skin.

Just another way of Going Green!!

• Reuse paper. Ask office employees to place paper that has only been used on one side inside of a special box or tray. When non-sensitive information must be written or printed, ask staff members to take paper from the stack of one-sided paper.

• Recycle Envelopes. When possible, reuse envelopes that have already been printed on. You can purchase address labels that can be affixed over an existing address.

• Take advantage of technology. Sending an email instead of sending a fax or memo takes less time, less paper, and will save on printing costs – make sure to recycle your e-waste too!

• Adjust font sizes. Make sure that all corporate paperwork is printed using the same basic font. By making the house font smaller and setting column widths a bit wider, you can cut back on printing paper.

• Cut back on mail. If your office receives mailers regularly, contact the National Waste Prevention Coalition. This organization will send you postcards (printed on recycled paper) that ask organizations not to send mailers to your office. You can also ask clients to send emails instead of letters.

Sometimes printing a letter or document is necessary. Purchasing recycled paper from the start is the best way to set a great office example. If your office is equipped with a kitchen, you can also purchase recycled paper goods. Recycling office paper doesn’t require much time or energy, but it will make a huge impact on the environment. Call Go Green Mobile Shredding today to turn your office paper into eco-friendly pulp. You can reach us at (877) 821-0217.

That’s a question that national laws and regulations don’t yet address. But states across the country, including California, are beginning to take on the challenge of paying for e-waste recycling and sustainable disposal of electronics through their own laws.

Here are a few:

New York – Free for Consumers, but Manufacturers Pay Up

New York State recently enacted a law that places the financial burden of e-waste recycling on the manufacturers. That is, companies like Apple, Dell, HP and Samsung will have to pay out of their own pockets for the collection and recycling of electronics that contain toxic materials.

Because the fee is paid directly by the manufacturer based on the type of e-waste they’ll be producing down the road, it incentivizes them to explore greener ways to make their top-selling gadgets.  Meanwhile, consumers pay nothing—all they have to do is participate in the manufacturer’s electronics take back program, or drop off the electronics at a certified pickup location. And by 2015, this will be mandatory for consumers—dumping electronics in the normal trash will be illegal by then.

Maine – Municipal Government/Producer Responsibility

In Maine, manufacturers pay for the recycling of e-waste, but municipal governments are in charge of collecting e-waste. Local governments are required to hold e-waste collection events or maintain e-waste drop off points for consumers. As such, part of the effort is paid for through tax dollars.

California – Consumers Contribute to Fund Innovation

In California, we have what is called an Advance Recovery Fee (ARF) system. This means that when Californians buy a computer, a cell phone or TV, they are charged an additional Electronic Waste Recycling Fee on top of their purchase. This money goes towards funding state-approved e-waste collectors and recycling centers across California.

The Electronic Waste Recycling Fee is not a deposit, nor is it a “prepayment” of the disposal fee for your covered electronic device. Rather, this money is used by the state to ensure that entrepreneurs and independent e-waste recyclers have the resources they need in order to recycle and process electronic waste in an eco-friendly and efficient fashion.

In this way, the Electronic Waste Recycling Fee plays a big role in ensuring that companies like Go Green Mobile Shredding can offer Southern California businesses cost-effective rates for e-waste pick up, e-waste disposal and hard drive destruction.

As Californian’s, we’re proud of the measures that our state legislators have taken in order to equitably distribute the costs of e-waste disposal and recycling. Because the sad fact is, when there aren’t laws and regulations in place to address the costs of e-waste management, then everyone pays—if not today, then tomorrow, when our ecosystems become endangered and our children and grandchildren become sick. We hope that other states, and perhaps the national government, will take cues from the successes demonstrated in states like New York, Maine and California. That way, we won’t be faced with difficult decisions, such as whether to fund public schools or to pay for superfund cleanup sites, or whether to invest in renewable energy or pay for the ongoing reclamation of contaminated landfills.

Going green is going well in California—and we’re glad that we can make it easy for you to do your part. Call Go Green Mobile Shredding for all your e-waste recycling and secure hard drive disposal needs.

But in spite of the benefits for the end user, solid state drives pose new challenges for data security. A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego concluded that securely erasing data on SSDs is more difficult than on HDDs for a number of reasons. Important takeaways from the study include:

Solid State Drives Cannot Be Degaussed

For years, degaussing was an important and highly effective step in decommissioning hard disk drives and other digital media. Data on tapes, hard disk drives and floppy disks is stored magnetically. By exposing these types of media to high powered magnets, the data was erased or rendered completely irrecoverable. Because of the way solid state drives store data, degaussing has little to no effect on them. This includes mass solid state drives as well as USB thumbdrives, SD cards and USB pendrives.

Secure Deletion Methods on SSDs Don’t Always Work

Software-driven secure file deletion methods usually involve formatting a drive and then overwriting the sectors where the data was stored. This process is sometimes called sanitization. You can buy commercial software that automates this process for you. The problem is, however, that the majority of such software is designed for hard disk drive interfaces. Because the method by which solid state drives physically write data to sectors is fundamentally different than the read/write process for hard disk drives, the secure deletion commands often do not get carried out properly for SSDs. To remedy this sisue, some SSD manufacturers have implemented built-in secure erasure mechanisms for SSDs, but even these features are less than 100% reliable.

Physical Destruction is Still the Most Secure Practice

As with hard disk drives, solid state drives that contain or formerly contained sensitive information should be shredded. The lesson that we’ve learned from other types of digital media is that no file can truly be eradicated electronically. With today’s technology, this is even more true for solid state drives.

Call Go Green Mobile Shredding and we’ll come to your office and shred your solid state drives on-site.

1. Particle Size Matters Most

Well-intentioned office managers often presume that, when it comes to paper shredding or hard drive destruction, smaller particle size always equals greater security. While it is important for shredded material to be practically unreconstructable, there are other points of vulnerability to consider beyond the risk of someone piecing together shredded paper or electronics. This is why government agencies stress the process of data destruction, rather than the resulting particle size. Regulations focus on best practices for the collection, transport, processing and disposal of sensitive material.

Don’t be overly impressed by the size of the particles that any particular shredding company claimed to produce. Particles that are 1/26” aren’t inherently more secure than particles that are 1/32”. Instead, ask how secure their data destruction process is. A good way to measure that is to check for National Association for Information Destruction (NAID) certification. NAID verifies approximately 20 different aspects of a data destruction company’s process before awarding certification.

2.  In-house Paper Shredding is Best

There’s a mentality that if you want something done right, do it yourself. But when it comes to data destruction, handling it in-house may actually leave you more liable. Shredded confidential documents in the dumpster behind your office building are easy targets for two reasons:

1. Dumpsters on public roads or even private alleys are easily, and in some cases, legally accessible.

2. Experienced dumpster divers know that shredded documents contain the most valuable information; that’s what they’ll grab first.

Outsourcing your paper shredding solves these issues by disposing your processed documents in a receptacle or facility that is not open to the public and  by comingling your shredded documents with material from other clients.

3. All Paper Recycling is Secure

Many  businesses have arrangements with recycling companies who buy their office paper, pick it up and take it to their facility for processing and baling. While these companies serve an important role for the environment, the purpose of this service is completely different from secure data destruction. This arrangement is purely for the sale of recyclables, and doesn’t account for the security of your company’s information. Sensitive documents could be compromised in transit to the facility or even at the facility by an employee.  A more secure way to dispose of your recyclable material is to shred them on-site, right before your eyes.

Go Green Mobile Shredding  is a NAID Member data destruction company that can shred your hard drives, digital media and paper on site, right in your parking lot. We issue a certificate of destruction documenting the secure processing of your materials and then bring them to a certified recycling facility.

Call Go Green Mobile Shredding today to learn how your office can protect its data and save the environment.

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.

1. Consume Less Power

Hard drives and networking hardware specs will now include power consumption details in the tech specs. Look for the idle power consumption and read/write power consumption, and go for the lowest you can find for both of these specs. This is especially important if you have server stacks or workstations running 24/7.

Many green hard drives, such as the Western Digital Green Power series, will have lower RPMs. This won’t significantly impact your performance. In most system tests, the NAS’ RAID engines prove to be more of a bottleneck in terms of speed, meaning that the performance difference you’ll see from choosing a 5,400 RPM hard disk drive instead of a 7,200 RPM HDD will be negligible or nonexistent.

2. Produce Less Heat

Computers throw off an impressive amount of heat. If you compare how stuffy a room can get with 100 or cocktail partygoers in it, it’s way worse when you shove a hundred or more computer components into a server closet. The more heat your IT equipment puts out, the more your fans will have to run and the more power the units will consume. Furthermore, your building’s air conditioning will have to work harder, too.

When reading reviews of hard drives and other computer equipment, pay attention to how it handles heat and cooling.

3. Recycle Old Hard Drives

Whether you are complying with document retention policies and regulations or upgrading to greener hard drives, what you do with your old hard disk drives and other physical media matters for the planet.  Old hard drives qualify as e-waste, which means you have a duty to see that it ends up at an approved recycling center.

At Go Green Mobile Shredding, we can help you with this last step. We’ll come to your office and shred your hard drives on-site, so you can rest assured that any confidential data that may remain on the drive is rendered 100% irrecoverable. Then, we’ll take your shredded hard drives—and any other e-waste you may have—and bring it to a sustainable e-waste recycler.

Call us today to find out how we can help you fulfill your responsibilities by going green.

If you’re a concerned parent, you may recognize number 7 plastics as the category to which polycarbonate products, including DVDs, belong to. Polycarbonate has been controversial lately since studies show that they leach bisphenol A into food and water. Bisphenol A, or BPA, has been shown to be harmful to infants and fetuses. Because of this, it is particularly important to keep number 7 plastics out of landfills and dispose of them sustainable so that they do not contaminate water that can eventually cycle back into habitats or drinking water supplies.

At Go Green Mobile Shredding, we shred and recycle all types of e-waste and digital media, including CDs, DVDs, hard drives, tape drives, floppy disks, zip disks and Blu-ray discs. This is not only greener for the Earth, it’s safer for your colleagues and customers. CDs and DVDs, even heavily scratched or damaged CDs and DVDs, contain readable data that is physically etched into the media. A persistent identity thief could extract data from optical media and recover personal information from it for unscrupulous means. So, when you shred your CDs, DVDs, hard drives and other e-waste, you’re not just helping the environment, you’re protecting the privacy of your community members.

If you’re interested in doing more to conserve the environment and keep your sensitive data secure, give us a call at (877) 821-0217 and ask about our on-site mobile shredding.

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.

While our greatest minds are still working on solutions for clean, secure energy, another crisis of natural resources is looming on the horizon. The smartphone may just be the automobile of the 21^st century. While we often equate the luxury of a cutting edge gadget with a high tech society, today’s most sophisticated cell phones begin their lives as rare earth elements, such as coltan, and other precious metals, such as gold, copper, manganese, zinc, platinum, palladium and tin. In fact, a study by the Future Exploration Network found that 1 metric ton of used cell phones yields 1,000 times more gold than gold ore.

The problem is that the value of these rare elements isn’t yet factored into the pricing of a smartphone. In fact, it’s almost always cheaper to replace a cell phone than to repair one. For example, Apple charges about $199 to repair an iPhone out-of-warranty, which is the same price as a brand new iPhone 4 with a Verizon contract.  As a result, we go through mobile phones much faster than we go through computers, laptops, hard drives, televisions, monitors, printers and other electronics.

Pundits and advocates are already worrying about “peak oil.” But when will concerns over “peak rare earth” reach the mainstream consciousness? Areas with rich deposits of rare earth such as Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are already receiving a vast amount of international attention, and many activists are raising awareness about the “conflict minerals” that go into cell phones and other electronics.

Coltan, the most notorious of conflict materials, is found in most of our electronics, including:

• DVD players
• Mobile phones
• Video game consoles
• Computers
• Laptops
• Inkjet printers
• Hearing aids
• Pacemakers
• Digital cameras

The time to start being conscientious about how we produce and dispose of cell phones is now.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control estimated that about 15.3 million cell phones were sold in California in 2009. Considering that most cell phone companies give you a free or discounted upgrade phone every two years, that means we’re on course to have a vast amount of unwanted mobile phones on our hands in 2011. In California, there’s good news: we’ve boosted our cell phone recycling rate from 17% in 2007 to 27% in 2009. That’s a vast improvement, but we can do better!

Aside from the violence and conflict caused by the increasing demand and dwindling supply of cell phone raw materials, improperly disposed cell phones harm the environment here at home as well. Mobile phone batteries and other components leech heavy metals and carcinogens into our environment.

So, if you have a drawer full of old cell phones, don’t throw them in the trash. Call Go Green Mobile Shredding and we’ll help you recycle them sustainably so you can do your part to conserve precious natural resources and protect the environment.