The growing electronic waste (e-waste) crisis is escalating. According to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor, e-waste has grown eightfold since 2010, outpacing electronics recycling by almost five times.
Businesses must rethink legacy IT asset retirement practices—and ESG teams can help.
IT security and asset management teams are responsible for protecting information stored on used drives, servers, employee laptops, and other media. They know leaving sensitive data accessible courts disaster. For the organization, there’s the potential exposure of consumer information. PR fallout. Fines. Lost trust.
For the IT decision maker, it could mean a lost job.
That’s why pragmatic, security-conscious IT disposition teams often physically destroy used devices—to counter the risk. The result is that whether the remnants get recycled or sent to landfills, companies destroy millions of usable devices every year. Not only does this prematurely turn functional devices and drives into e-waste, but it also creates a greater tax on the natural resources and energy needed to create replacements.
A more sustainable approach is to completely destroy only the data. By targeting the data itself, rather than whole devices, organizations preserve today’s valuable technology for ongoing use in other departments or for resale via the circular economy. Many enterprises use their devices for only two to three years, even though they remain supported and functional far longer.
One way to process and prepare devices for reuse is for organizations to employ data sanitization to ensure no sensitive corporate data is left behind. In fact, this scalable, targeted option is used by many global businesses across a variety of data storage media.
Data sanitization is the disciplined process of deliberately, permanently and irreversibly removing or destroying the data stored on a memory device to make it unrecoverable, according to Gartner.
Moving from an asset destruction to a data erasure adoption mindset requires moving beyond entrenched legacy thinking. Building a company culture based on sustainability security provides multiple benefits to the organization, including:
Taking this approach also requires ESG and IT teams to collaborate more closely to prioritize environmental responsibility in daily operations. While executives set high-level ESG goals, frontline teams often struggle to implement them—especially when policies clash with entrenched IT routines. When considering end-of-life asset management, IT decision-makers may overlook sustainability performance as long as data security objectives are met (despite it being possible to achieve both).
Even when there’s buy-in from leadership, new sustainable approaches can meet friction when they affect policies mired in rigid technical routines. This is particularly tricky for cybersecurity-first organizations.
Closing the gap between the philosophical, high-level sustainability goals and the practical IT processes is critical. But for this to occur, sustainability stakeholders and IT teams must be in sync.
Recently, Blancco released a study based on the responses of 2,000 cybersecurity, IT and sustainability leaders at global organizations. The study revealed differences between how IT teams and their ESG counterparts viewed their collaboration on how to dispose of outdated or unwanted IT equipment. Only 2% said sustainability has no influence, indicating broad support for ESG goals.
This is excellent news—in theory. Yet the study also revealed:
This reveals a missed opportunity for EIOs and IT teams alike. These discussions allow alignment on IT priorities and concerns, while addressing the urge to destroy devices unnecessarily. They also present prime opportunities for sustainability teams to seek out additional options for mutual support.
If sustainability roles are underrepresented in IT decision making, alignment will falter. For instance, IT teams may underestimate the environmental impact hardware destruction can have. ESG teams can share data on device recycling limits and the advantages of reuse.
ESG teams can also show how data sanitization doesn’t just tick compliance boxes but strengthens security. For end-of-life asset management, this means ensuring IT teams enact asset disposition policies based on current, industry-recognized data sanitization standards. Such standards include IEEE 2883 and NIST SP 800-88—but not outdated ones like DoD 5220.22-M.
In the research report mentioned earlier, only 36% and 37% (respectively) of the IT and ESG leaders surveyed were aware of the current standards. With NIST last updated in 2014, the more modern IEEE standard is gaining traction as organizations take on AI and IoT processing. Without following these guidance documents, well-intentioned policies can include outdated practices that miss how densely data is now stored. That’s a problem for both data security and ESG goals.
To strengthen collaboration, sustainability and IT stakeholders should align on shared goals and processes, including:
Together, these efforts bridge silos and embed sustainability into IT processes—driving lasting impact for the company.
Fredrik Forslund currently serves as Vice President and General Manager of International Sales for Blancco Technology Group. Fredrik brings over 20 years of experience in IT security. This includes most recently leading Blancco's data center and cloud erasure initiatives and before that, founding SafeIT, a security software company focusing on encryption and selective data erasure. His experience also includes serving as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company.
