Hard drives should not go in the general trash which usuallu heads to landfill - they should be sent to e-waste for proper disposal / recycling.
Older drives will have lead solder, and vintage hard drives will have even more toxic content potentially including cadmium, beryllium, and mercury. None of that belongs in landfill. Beyond old drives, newer drives have many valuable recyclable materials - send it to e-waste.
If only such e-waste recipients were more readily available and inexpensive. Even my not-so-small town only has e-waste days a few times a year, hope you’re off that day and time, and of course you have to pay to drop anything off. A real disincentive for the average person to do anything except throw e-waste into the trash.
In Australia we just take it to an electronics retailer since 2011 - as they are now legally required to accept it and send it on to a certified e-waste disposal partner, provided they import over a certain threshold (avoids overburdening small businesses). For example if the store sells computers they have to accept computer e-waste, so you can drop it with them - even if you didn’t buy it there. It is all free.
You guys should be better at that.
Here in Norway any store that sells electronic products are required by law to also take in e-waste from any private person (and any private company that is a customer of that store) and handle that e-waste correctly.
All municipals are also required to make sure there are enough free e-waste return points for their citizens.
In Montreal it’s pretty terrible. It’s a fragmented set of hodge-podge solutions. Batteries? Take them to the thrift store. Phone? Drop it off in a metal box next to a grocery store, but not separate batteries there! Bigger items? Go to an “eco-center”, only to find out they are not easily accessible by public transit and even if you find one close to a bus stop, it’s still a walk up an access street with no sidewalk where you notice the center is more for contractors to drive up in F350s and dump drywall, and when you show up on foot with a backpack full of crap they ignore you or look at you with a dull, bovine expression of “that wasn’t in the training video”.
Same here, we used to be able to at Best Buy, but they closed that in our town so now the only option I’m aware of is the church downtown doing an e-waste recycling day once every quarter or so.
I saved a perfectly good Trinitron from being recycled there one year.
Our area in BC has free drop off all week, at the same place as bottle, can, battery, oil, etc collection.
Sometimes computer dudes hangout waiting to reclaim PC and laptop parts
Wish we had that. More than one occasion I wouldn’t have minded scavenging some parts.
I always open them and thoroughly trash the disks first.
I collect the magnets myself. They’re super strong and ive always found uses for them elsewhere
They should not usually go to landfills. That’s the problem here.
Yeah that was what i said?
Nobody is sorting through bagged trash like in the picture mate. Bagged trash generally goes to landfill.
Leave the word ‘bad’. Write ‘bitcoins’, and cross it out. Gives a good reason for it to be the trash, and everyone knows someone who thinks they can recover a hard drive.
Its not “everyone can” not even “everyone knows someone who can” but " everyone knows someone who THINKS they can".
8% of men think they can 1v1 a gorilla without weapons. Don’t you think enough people think they can recover a drive?
I can 1v1 a gorilla without weapons easily. I’ll lose and die horribly, but that wasn’t the question.
I stand by it, although you make a valid point. I think way more people (probably men tbh lol) think they can 1v1 a gorilla than think they can recover a hard drive. Most people probably don’t even know what a hard drive is these days.
Well yeah, who doesn’t know how to recover data… This is a great tool https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Also just live boot linux and use the strings command and point it at a harddrive and pipe out the string data to a file for name review
If the drive is toast there are paid services that will disable it and recover data off the drives with higher tech methods.
I know an old geologist who loves to leave bigass rocks out in the wilderness, far from where they should naturally originate. He does this specifically to fuck with future geologists.
You can use a dry erase marker to remove permanent marker.
Isopropyl alcohol 👍
My kind of chaos goblin.
I like to hammer a big ass nail through dead HDDs.
That or absolutely trash them with a sledgehammer.
You’re not pulling data off a maraca full of glass platter shards.
Open them up. Free magnet.
I have a chunk the size of baseball. Some are the old school magnets that will jump across the table and give you a blood blister. Because that’s happened 4 times in the last 25 years.
Mr. Robot taught me you just need to microwave everything.
Might fuck your microwave up though, no?
If you open them, the disk platters make nice if possibly slightly toxic coasters.
What?! They’re perfectly safe, got pic of my toddler daughter chewing on one. She turned out slightly autismo, whatever. (All of the above facts are true.)
She ate the Bitcoins 😭
For personal ones I just sell them to recyclers with other old computer parts.
Worst lotto scratcher, ever.
Chaotic good
More like Chaotic Trolling
How to dispose of encrypted drives with NDA datasheets. — Chalcopyrite – this is not the digigold you went looking for…
You became a copper baron!
…Timmy died of dysentery.
Damn, I need to do this. I knew keeping those floppy disks would be useful for something someday. I’ll even throw in a zip disk in there.
Can you imagine how much Bitcoin would fit on a Jazz drive?
Fill the drive with memes
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How to be a victim of identity theft: 101
