Sure, we have certifications. But so do a lot of companies. The importance of certifications isn’t in having them, it’s in the change in mindset and process that they represent in your organization. Here are the certifications that we chose and why we put in the work to get them.
The ISO 9001 certification is all about maintaining quality in a fast-moving, change-heavy environment. We reached for this certification for two reasons:
We have third parties come in and test us to make sure that we stay at the top of our game, and that the processes that we’ve developed on paperwork in real life.
This attention to training and detail ensures that we’re doing the right things for our customers and that we’re taking the necessary steps in project design and management to avoid potential catastrophes like losing data, not wiping a hard drive, or missing an important step in the logistics chain.
These vetted processes allow us to process equipment from thousands of locations around the globe every year.
Proof positive that we put our money, time, and effort where our mouth is. There are a lot of fly-by-night “recyclers” out there. You can read about them in the news when they abandon a warehouse of CRTs or ship circuit boards to Ghana. Forget that! We do it the right way because it matters to us.
Just like ISO 9001 focuses on the quality control for our standard processes, ISO 14001, e-Stewards, and R2 help us to stay on top of the latest in environmentally friendly, zero-landfill, and zero-incinerator disposal. These certifications matter for 2 reasons:
It goes back to Regan’s “trust, but verify”. Anyone can say they do the right thing, but these certifications verify it as fact. We don’t subscribe to hope-disposal1. We make sure it happens.
Wiping down the counters in your house is nothing like cleaning up in a hospital. There’s a big difference between home “clean” and ICU sanitary. Data erasure works the same exact way.
For most people, merely deleting a file is plenty. Nothing we do is that sensitive, except perhaps the tax documents that we process every April.2 But for a business, if you don’t sanitize your drives, you open yourself up to a world of hurt.
Deleting information from drives is easy – just unlink the file; sanitizing them is the hard part. It takes a lot of specialized knowledge to sanitize a disk correctly. You have to know all about the specifics of the device, where it stores sensitive information, and how to read and write that information to the device.
We joined NAID to keep up to date with the latest data erasure advancements and encourage the community toward data safety standards.
We’re in business to provide a better life for our people, our planet, and our partners. We implemented OHSAS 18001 because we thought it was the best possible way to make sure that our processes protected all of the people who work in our facilities every day.
This isn’t the 1890s, and people should not be cogs in a machine. Each of our people has their own dreams, goals, likes, struggles, personalities, quirks, and own way of seeing the world. What they do have in common, is specialized knowledge about how to safely and efficiently turn unwanted IT assets into usable materials – whether it’s through reuse or teardown and recycling.
Our business stops if our people do. So it’s our job to keep them safe.
We use the OHSAS 18001 certification to systematically reduce and eliminate risk to our people by ensuring that our facilities and processes meet or exceed the latest in occupational health and safety standards.
Do you have certifications? Do you know why? If not, it’s time to take a more strategic approach to the time you invest in certification.