Surplus electronic devices safely

Did you know that NC State’s Materials Management offers Surplus Property Services that allow you to re-purpose, reuse, resell, and recycle NC State property, including all of your electronic devices? This service keeps hundreds of pounds of waste from landfills weekly.

Before you surplus any electronic device, it is critically important to follow procedures to ensure all hard drives are wiped of content to safeguard NC State data and sensitive information that might reside on these devices.

Per Materials Management – Disposition of Property, campus departments are responsible for purging data from electronic devices that store data, including copiers, iPads, cell phones, tablets, printers, scanners, and projectors. When disposing of electronic media or equipment:

  • Check with the manufacturer for verification if data storage exists.
  • If the device is equipped with internal storage, follow the instructions for data removal on the OIT website.
  • If the data cannot be erased, remove the internal storage drive before you surplus the device.

The OIT Data Removal Web page provides links to hard disk drive erasing guidelines and tools, such as Active@ KillDisk for PCs, that must be employed to wipe data from electronic devices.

You must verify and document data removal from a device before you deliver it to the Materials Management Surplus team. The Surplus team is not staffed to perform verification of data removal on the electronic devices they receive.

When you or your college unit or department take the proper data removal steps to surplus electronic devices, you help to support campus sustainability initiatives and promote the security and privacy of NC State data.