Doing whatever you can as a business to protect the environment is essential if you are to hold on to your current customer base and to increase upon it. Customers in Australia nowadays are incredibly savvy when it comes to the environment and so they expect you to do what you can to protect it at all times. You may be instructing your staff to separate their plastics, glass and other materials in the workplace and you may be taking steps to reduce your carbon footprint by installing more LED lights and having plants in the workplace to clean the air, but many businesses overlook one important aspect of doing business and that is information technology.
IT equipment can become obsolete in a very short space of time and so you need to be able to dispose of your old equipment in an environmentally responsible way and in order for that to happen, you need sustainable technology life-cycle management. There are a number of legal obligations that you have when running a business in Australia but you should be looking beyond this and you should want to do the right thing because it is ethically sound. If your business is currently taking shortcuts when it comes to disposing of your business IT equipment then the following are some of the top tips that will help you to stay on the right side of the law.
- You must comply with regulations – There are many regulations that need to be adhered to in Australia when it comes to the disposal of your electrical equipment and you should know by now that you just can’t dump your computer hardware at the local landfill site. You also have a responsibility as a business entity to make sure that your customer’s private information doesn’t find its way into the wrong people’s hands. This is why you need to make sure that everything is destroyed in an incredibly secure manner and this doesn’t mean just hitting it with a hammer and dumping it in a skip.
- Use an approved facility – The government stipulates that you should dispose of your electrical and electronic IT equipment with an approved provider and so there are a number of specialist IT disposal companies all across Australia that can provide this service to you. They will also offer you a certificate showing that you have disposed of your items in a responsible manner.
- You could donate & recycle – There are a number of websites currently available that you can actually donate your old IT equipment to and so this means that it finds a new home and you were doing your bit for the environment. You must first take the relevant steps to make sure that the IT equipment is wiped of any data but after that, you are free to give away old equipment so that it can be used somewhere else.
These are just three of the things that you can do to stay on the right side of the environmental laws in Australia and believe me when I tell you that there are numerous more.