The Office of Sustainability will host a free recycling event for old electronics 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday (March 23) in the Coliseum parking lot. Faculty, staff, and students can bring personal items such as computers, printers, cell phones, cable/wire, etc.
This event is for personal items only; WVU property should be routed to WVU surplus on the Sponsored Projects & Property Administration website. We won’t accept TVs, lamps, vacuums, or appliances/white goods.
Information Technology Services recommends your protect any personal data on your electronics by removing and keeping the hard drive. If you can’t do this, take these steps:
Back up important files to an external hard drive or online backup service, or transfer them to your new computer. Removing data will take some time, so do this a few days before recycling or repurposing.
Completely remove data. Just deleting your files isn’t sufficient. Instead, overwrite your data. Microsoft provides the ability to reset a PC. Be sure to select the option to remove everything, and Windows will overwrite the drive with junk data, then reinstall the operating system. Macs can also be reformatted and a clean operating system installed.
Do it again. If you really want to make sure your data can’t be recovered, overwrite it again.
If you have recently purchased a new computer, consider enabling encryption. Windows offers the BitLocker feature built into Professional versions, and Mac offers FileVault. This will secure your files so someone would need your encryption key to access your data.
For more information visit the Recycling page on the Sustainability website.