Destruction of Data Carriers—Secure and Sustainable. How Standardisation can Help to Save Resources

Driven by digitalization and globalization, the global data volume is growing by an average of 28% annually and is expected to increase from 33 to 175 zettabytes between 2018 and 2025. The data carriers required for this include electronic components that are made from valuable and critical raw materials, e.g. neodymium in hard disk drives and precious metals in solid state drives. With regard to their “end of life”, the legitimate requirements of data protection and information security, in practice, cause a trade-off with the resource-efficient handling of data storage products. Restrictions applying to the method of mechanical destruction in existing standards such as ISO/IEC 21964 “Destruction of data carriers” have a negative impact on both the extension of the device's service life through reuse and the effective recovery of precious and critical metals at the end of life. We discuss an approach on how to overcome this trade-off and how standardisation can contribute. As a safeguard, actors refer almost exclusively to existing standards, but this means that available technologies for secure, verifiable, non-destructive data erasure or for the recovery of precious metals and critical raw materials from waste data storage devices are not used as they are not part of the standardised process landscape for treating data carriers at their end of usage or end of life. Therefore standardisation, also as a technical specification of EU regulations, can play a central role, for example by defining reliable process descriptions and evaluation criteria that take into account the interconnected aspects of a) ecodesign, e.g. a functionality for secure data deletion, b) data protection, and c) resource efficiency, e.g. storage reuse and recovery of critical raw materials. In Germany, a need for action was identified in the Standardisation Roadmap Circular Economy and a corresponding process was started in 2023 to further develop the standardisation of data erasure and data carrier destruction towards sustainability and resource efficiency - without compromising data security or privacy.