U.S. Micro Expands Operations For Reselling, Recycling Electronic Waste

Electronic waste collector and data destruction service provider U.S. Micro is expanding across the country with the opening of a new facility in Las Vegas, Nev.

U.S. Micro, which in 1995 started operations in Atlanta, Ga., also plans to move its headquarters to the new facility, said Jim Kegley, founder and president.

U.S. Micro makes on-site calls to large businesses looking to refresh their IT equipment, purchases that equipment, and then thoroughly deletes any data found before the equipment leaves the customer side, Kegley said.

The new Las Vegas facility, which is open, will allow the company to better serve customers in the Western U.S., he said.

Handling customer data is the most important part of electronic waste operations, Kegley said. "We use our own technicians and employees who visit the customer locations," he said. "We don't use sub-contractors. For a company like a large bank, the biggest fear is data ending up in the wrong hands."

Customer data is stored on a lot of devices, and without careful screening of those devices the data could find its way to unauthorized users, Kegley.

For instance, it's common to find CD-ROMs or USB thumb drives in a desktop or notebook PC with customer data, he said. Smart phones must also be carefully screened as some of them are tossed with their microSD chips, which often contain unencrypted sensitive data. It is also important to check old copiers and printers before selling them because most now come with hard drives which are used to store copy or print jobs, he said.

Hard drives from servers, PCs, storage devices, and other office electronics are wiped clean of data using technologies that do the job to Department of Defense standards before being removed from the customer site, Kegley said.

Special care is taken with SSDs. "There's a recent issue that has come up with SSDs," he said. "New research suggests that data is not deleted from SSDs even when they are wiped. In such cases, we err on the side of physical destruction."

Any storage devices which cannot either be safely wiped free of data or destroyed on-site are shipped using Brinks armored car service to the U.S. Micro site where it is either destroyed immediately or placed in a vault temporarily until it is physically shredded, Kegley said.

All data storage devices are inventoried on site, and automated reports are provided to confirm data wiping or physical destruction for auditing purposes, he said. "We want to take out the manual process," he said. "If this is being monitored manually, it is possible to overlook something in the process."

U.S. Micro refurbishes and resells about 90 percent of the electronic waste it receives, with the remainder safely recycled, Kegley said. Most equipment under three years old is resold to customers overseas, with the older equipment mainly going to U.S.-based entities who resell them to schools and government agencies in this country, he said.

Electronic waste that is not suitable for resale is physically destroyed and recycled in environmentally-friendly ways in this country and turned into non-volatile materials for construction or finished products such as bicycle racks and outdoor lumber, Kegley said.

"We have a 'No Landfill' policy," he said. "This industry has very little oversight. So most obsolete equipment ends up overseas or in the deserts of the Western U.S. It's estimated that there are 40 million pounds of CRT leaded CRT glass from California sitting in deserts in Arizona."

U.S. Micro partners with large leasing companies and with solution providers to find customers looking to get rid of old equipment, Kegley said. The average customer has about 10,000 employees, while quite a few have several hundred thousand employees, he said.