IT equipment disposal glossary
Plain-English explanations of the terms you will come across.
- ADISA
- An independent certification scheme for IT asset disposal providers that audits their processes and tests processed equipment. Its asset recovery standard is approved by the ICO as a UK GDPR certification scheme.
- Certificate of destruction
- A document confirming that specified media or devices were destroyed, ideally listing each drive by serial number along with the date, location and method used.
- Chain of custody
- The documented record of who held equipment at each stage from your premises to final processing, so you can show nothing went missing or was handled by unauthorised people.
- Cryptographic erase
- A sanitisation method for self-encrypting drives that destroys the internal encryption key, leaving the stored data as unreadable ciphertext. It is fast but should be combined with verification.
- Data sanitisation
- The process of making data on storage media unrecoverable, whether by overwriting, using a drive's built-in sanitise commands, cryptographic erase or physical destruction, ideally with verification of the result.
- Degaussing
- Wiping magnetic media such as hard drives and tapes with a strong magnetic field. It leaves the drive unusable, does not work on SSDs or flash storage, and is usually followed by shredding.
- DIN 66399
- A German standard widely used in the UK to describe shredding security levels and maximum particle sizes, with separate categories for paper, magnetic media, optical discs and solid-state storage.
- Duty of Care
- The legal duty on anyone producing or handling waste to keep it secure, pass it only to authorised people, describe it accurately and complete the right paperwork.
- Hazardous waste consignment note
- The document required in England and Wales when moving hazardous waste such as CRT monitors or lead-acid batteries. Scotland and Northern Ireland use their own equivalent forms.
- ITAD
- IT asset disposition. The industry term for retiring IT equipment securely, covering collection, data destruction, reuse, resale and recycling, along with the reporting that shows what happened to each device.
- NIST SP 800-88
- A widely used US standard for media sanitisation that defines three levels, Clear, Purge and Destroy, and explains suitable methods for different types of storage. Many UK providers work to it.
- Remarketing
- Refurbishing, grading and reselling used IT equipment after data destruction, with the proceeds used to offset disposal costs or returned to the original owner.
- Secure erase and sanitise commands
- Instructions built into hard drives, SSDs and NVMe drives that tell the drive firmware to clear all user data, including areas ordinary overwriting cannot reach. Proper SSD erasure relies on them.
- Waste transfer note
- The legal document that must accompany non-hazardous waste when it changes hands, describing the waste and naming the producer and carrier. It must be kept for at least two years.
- WEEE
- Waste electrical and electronic equipment. Any discarded item that needs electricity or batteries to work, including computers, monitors, phones and printers, regulated in the UK under the WEEE Regulations 2013.
Last updated 6 November 2026