Information security, recycling and irony

[Bill McGonigle]

On Feb 2, 2006, at 11:28, Christopher Chisholm wrote:

> totally destroy data ON-SITE

If you can trust your employees to make decisions about what needs to 
be destroyed and what doesn't, many companies have two paper recycling 
bins - one for normal recycling and one "To Be Shredded".  There are 
big trucks with shredders that come onsite, shred that paper and take 
it away.

If you can't trust your employees to decide properly, you shred all 
recycled paper, at least from departments where people have access to 
it.  If it's just being dissolved down for pulp it doesn't affect the 
recycling value but it does not pack as well so it's more expensive to 
transport.  That's not a factor when you're dealing with medical or 
financial data.

Regarding what's worth recycling, I've looked into this a bit recently 
as I got volunteered to be the chairman of my town's waste collection 
group.  About 5% of plastics wind up being recycled, there simply 
aren't enough buyers for the amount of volume that's available and it's 
a money loser due to supply/demand economics.  Aluminum and Cardboard 
make money, recyclers want this.  So is steel in today's market.  But 
the boarder economics of it are complex.  If everybody in town has to 
drive their recycling to a transfer station, it's not worth it.  The 
cost of gas and vehicle maintenance outweighs the energy savings and 
landfill costs.  In these towns, the recycling program is "feel-good" 
though the town can make money itself (but not at a rate to offset the 
citizens' cost of deliver, especially if you look at opportunity 
costs).  The only model that's viable environmentally and economically 
is curbside recycling where the incremental fuel used for each house is 
the distance between houses.  After sale of materials, these programs 
are about break-even, which is still good because you don't have costs 
associated with landfills/ash dumps.

But which mailing list is this again?  Oh, right, linux.  So, obviously 
the enemy here is consumables and disposables.  It's more cost 
effective to buy and maintain disk space than paper if you figure in 
the productivity increases inherent in document management systems, 
wikis, online reporting tools and the like.  Plus, access control is 
implicit in an online system and you have auditing capability.  It's 
hard to prevent people from hitting printscreen and dumping an image, 
so give them the tools (laptops, projectors, wireless) to do what they 
need where they need without paper.  And for Pete's sake, if you buy 
internal departments color laser printers you're just enabling them to 
go to paper.  Now, granted, all this gear uses electricity and makes 
nasty toxic sludge in its manufacture, so you have to weigh that 
against forests and pulp mill acid and worker productivity and, well, 
the economics are complex.  But I can tell you today, somebody at the 
Boston Globe wishes they were paperless internally so they don't wind 
up paperless externally.

-Bill

-----
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
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