Addressing one of the biggest security concerns within the IT industry and healthcare market, Ingram Micro Inc. (NYSE: IM) today announced its new IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) Services are readily available for resell by channel partners throughout the U.S.

Developed in collaboration with U.S. Micro, Ingram Micro's new ITAD Services enable solution providers to offer U.S. businesses and consumers the secure removal of data from all types of IT storage devices including hard disk drives, SD memory cards, printers, copiers or any other electronic device that carries a digital history.

By leveraging the new ITAD Services, Ingram Micro solution providers can provide customers with environmentally friendly IT disposal services that are proven to remove the risk of future liability for the improper disposal of electronic waste and potentially hazardous materials. Additionally, Ingram Micro’s ITAD Services are approved for use by regulatory influences such as HIPAA that require healthcare facilities to determine and document the appropriate methods used to dispose of hardware, software and data.

"The security risk, regulatory requirements and environmental concerns around how to get rid of old or unwanted technology are weighing heavily on businesses and consumers, and with good reason", says Ted Tilden, senior director of sales, U.S. Micro. "Recent reports indicate that Americans trash more than two million tons of personal and professional electronics each year – six times more than what is recycled. It’s a frightening reality that cannot be sustained and calls for immediate and meaningful actions."

"The fallout from data breaches, identity theft and the improper disposal of IT equipment and data is not only costly, but in many cases can be disastrous and undetermined", says Michael Humke, senior director, public sector and healthcare markets, Ingram Micro U.S. "As trusted advisors to both businesses and consumers, our partners in the Public Sector and Healthcare markets are perfectly positioned to offer IT asset disposition services as part of their IT services portfolio. Together, Ingram Micro and U.S. Micro stand ready to enable our channel partners to turn this opportunity into a recurring revenue stream that will bring added value to their business, as well as the clients they serve."

Available now as part of the Ingram Micro Services Division’s Professional Services portfolio, the new ITAD Services offer both on-site and facility-driven removal of information from devices, including the secure transport of devices to the processing facility. Upon completion of services rendered, solution providers and their clients will receive the necessary documentation and certifications noting the release of liability from any unauthorized or accidental release of electronic information.

"With the IT refresh cycle underway and adoption of cloud set to explode in 2012, the timing and business value around Ingram Micro’s new ITAD services couldn’t get any better", says Renee Bergeron, vice president of managed services and cloud computing, Ingram Micro North America.

"As a company, Ingram Micro takes great pride in supporting environmentally-sustainable initiatives and services through our Smart Citizen, Smart Steward program", concludes Bergeron. "When we can extend these efforts into the greater IT community and make it easier, and in this case profitable, for our solution provider partners to actively engage in earth-friendly activities and offer those services to their customers, the rewards are even greater."

For more information about Ingram Micro’s new ITAD Services solution providers can contact the Ingram Micro Professional Services team at IMSNServices@IngramMicro.com.

Follow Ingram Micro Inc. on Facebook at www.facebook.com/IngramMicro and Twitter at www.twitter.com/IngramMicroInc.

U.S. Micro Corporation
Since 1995, U.S. Micro Corporation has been a major innovator and leader in enterprise IT data security. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev., U.S. Micro serves Fortune 500 companies that demand the highest levels of data security and environmental stewardship. Committed to a 100 percent no landfill policy, the company refurbishes and sells approximately 90 percent of the equipment it processes; the remaining 10 percent is EPA-compliantly recycled at its Next-Generation IT Demanufacturing and Distribution Center in Las Vegas. U.S. Micro is R2, G.R.A.D.E. (Green Recycling Asset Disposal for the Enterprise), ISO 14001:2004 and Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified. It is also a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher and holds the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2, Type II designation.

What better time to show off new tech recycling center than during CES

Thousands of people are in town this week to see how consumer electronics are born.

Some of them took a little side trip to see where they go to die.

U.S. Micro Corp., a computer recycling company formerly based in Smyrna, Ga., officially opened its new 130,000-square-foot plant and headquarters in Las Vegas on Wednesday, inviting some of the crowd in town for the International Consumer Electronics Show.

While computer de-manufacturing and recycling have been under way at the new plant for about two months, U.S. Micro founder and CEO Jim Kegley decided that the middle of CES was an ideal time to show off the $20 million facility that includes a first-class weight room, game room and kitchen in addition to several lines of machines designed to chew up and spit out obsolete computers and electronics and grind them down to sand.

More than 300 people took tours and met U.S. Micro managers, and Sen. Dean Heller was on hand for the opening.

“I never thought I’d get the kind of reception we’ve received,” Kegley said after greeting customers and well-wishers. Kegley said he’s already signed up some casinos and gaming equipment suppliers to contracts to dispose of their old computers and devices.

Kegley said the challenge that lies ahead is getting the word out that the company is here and in operation to serve the Western United States.

The Consumer Electronics Association, operators of CES, sponsor several green initiatives including a Sustainable Planet TechZone dedicated to energy-efficient technologies. Trade Show Executive magazine in 2011 named CES North America’s greenest show.

About 90 percent of the devices brought to U.S. Micro are decommissioned, wiped clean of data and refurbished for sale as reconditioned units. The rest go through a series of shredders and separators to recover anything of value and to grind what’s left into sand.

After some of the valuable and recyclable metals are removed, the computers are separated, shredded and crushed before being turned into new products. Bicycle racks and curbing blocks are manufactured from the recycled materials.

The largest industrial shredder in the plant can chew through two tons of materials in an hour.

Data eradication is a key part of the U.S. Micro mission. The company destroys most data in the presence of its customers. Some data storage units that are sent to the company for destruction are locked in a highly secure vault in the building.

Since the time the doors of its Georgia facility opened in 1995, with 1 million IT devices processed a year, U.S. Micro says it has never had a data breach.

Kegley has said the plant, when fully operational in about a year, will have 100 employees, most of whom are being hired locally. Kegley said a handful of executives have moved from Georgia.

U.S. Micro Corporation
Since 1995, U.S. Micro Corporation has been a major innovator and leader in enterprise IT data security. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev., U.S. Micro serves Fortune 500 companies that demand the highest levels of data security and environmental stewardship. Committed to a 100 percent no landfill policy, the company refurbishes and sells approximately 90 percent of the equipment it processes; the remaining 10 percent is EPA-compliantly recycled at its Next-Generation IT Demanufacturing and Distribution Center in Las Vegas. U.S. Micro is R2, G.R.A.D.E. (Green Recycling Asset Disposal for the Enterprise), ISO 14001:2004 and Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified. It is also a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher and holds the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2, Type II designation.

LAS VEGAS -- Inside the mad hum of the convention center, an overwhelming array of gadgetry confronts attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show, a showcase for much that is new in the technology world. The products seem impervious to the workings of time, as if the latest smartphones and tablet computers -- so shiny and sleek -- are permanently tethered to the future.

Yet 10 miles to the west, on a patch of reddish desert beyond the high-rise casinos of the Las Vegas Strip, a building the size of an airplane hangar serves as the final resting place for old electronics. This is where gadgets go when they are wanted no more. Typically, they are refurbished and sold anew. Sometimes, they are stripped down to their basic elements and recycled into plastic, steel and precious metals. The new $20 million plant, which officially cut the ribbon here Wednesday afternoon, is the second such facility opened by U.S. Micro Corp., a business whose very existence illustrates the extent to which the world is increasingly contending with a surplus of unwanted electronics. Even products that seem intrinsically part of the modern age eventually become waste, presenting a growing threat to the environment and the sanctity of the data stored on electronics of every type.

Back in 1995, when the company’s chief executive and founder, Jim Kegley, opened the first plant in Atlanta, recycling old electronics was at best a niche business. Cell phones were still in their infancy, and a long way from the current fashion of trading up for a slicker model every two years. Popular computers remained on sale for three years and longer, eons by contemporary standards.

But last year, U.S. Micro -- a privately held company -- estimated that it processed about 1 million technology products, relying solely on the Atlanta plant. With the new facility here, the company foresees processing 1.5 million products this year. The company harvests old devices owned by major American companies across the industrial landscape and disposes of them, refurbishing and reselling about 90 percent of them, while recycling the rest.

"Typically, we find that our customers don't have a good outlet for their old equipment, and they are worried about their data, so they stockpile," Kegley told The Huffington Post during a visit this week. "We like to say, 'Storage is not a solution.'"

The growth of the electronics recycling industry sits at the confluence of two intensifying concerns -- the vulnerability of companies whose data is stored on myriad electronic devices, and awareness that huge volumes of old gadgets are landing in troubling places. Many take up space in landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that 70 percent of heavy metals landing in municipal waste disposal sites are the result of electronics being discarded. And many are shipped to China and other developing countries, where poor people laboriously harvest their innards using crude and dangerous methods, often polluting waterways and sickening communities.Top of Form Bottom of FormThe marketing pitch from U.S. Micro is predominantly focused on the threat posed by unwanted data lying around in discarded machines -- credit card and Social Security numbers left in the hard drives on computers of major banks; legal documents cached in the memories of copy and fax machines operated by publicly traded corporations; stray thumb drives and memory cards forgotten in old computer bags.

"Today, we see data everywhere," said Kegley. "People just don’t know what to do with this stuff."

But the plant here is also aimed at preventing so-called e-waste from sullying landfills in suburban American landfills or rivers in southern China, where whole towns are now engaged in the gritty work of melting down old circuit boards to extract copper and other precious metals.

The 10 percent of the electronic equipment that technicians deem unfit for refurbishing is fed into a series of conveyor belts and then into the guts of machines that break them into pieces. A large magnetized chamber separates the metals from the plastic, depositing each into industrial-size cardboard boxes to be trucked off to plants that can absorb them.The precious metals are sent to a plant in Europe that separates them into their base elements, Kegley said, while the plastics and steel are sold to domestic users, including the auto industry.

The company touts its ability to fully process all of the equipment it removes from its customers' premises as insurance against having any of it landing in the wrong hands. 

Many e-waste recyclers promise to responsibly dispose of old gadgets, only to sell them off to middlemen merchants who export to low-grade operations in China, India and other developing nations, according to environmental watchdogs. Advocates assert that e-waste recyclers must gain accreditation from bodies that audit their operations to verify their compliance with proper practices -- a step that U.S. Micro says it is now pursuing.

"There really aren't any legal standards for e-waste recycling," said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a San Francisco area non-profit watchdog group. "If you don't have any certification, and you're not audited, then we really don't know what you're doing with the material."

A Seattle-based non-profit, the Basel Action Network, oversees one such certification regimen, the so-called e-Stewards program, publishing a list of approved e-waste recyclers located in many communities.

Here in Las Vegas, U.S. Micro said it is pursuing accreditation from a competing regimen, the R2 standard, which includes participation from the EPA. The company said none of the equipment it handles winds up in a landfill or overseas, something it can guarantee by maintaining full control over the process.

On a walk through the concrete hangar earlier this week, the the volume of goods pouring in was unmistakable. Several dozen boxloads of gear sat stacked on wooden pallets in the loading dock, a trove trucked in from Phoenix and the Seattle area.

Here were boxes of Dell computer monitors, Cisco routers, a Hewlett-Packard laser jet printer, and a Canon copy machine. A Fujitsu scanner was tagged with a yellow sticky note bearing black magic marker: DO NOT MOVE JESSICA'S SCANNER.

Not that many years ago, Jessica's scanner had presumably sat inside a shrink-wrapped box, waiting to unleash new possibilities. Now, it was something else -- a modern form of detritus.

U.S. Micro Corporation
Since 1995, U.S. Micro Corporation has been a major innovator and leader in enterprise IT data security. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev., U.S. Micro serves Fortune 500 companies that demand the highest levels of data security and environmental stewardship. Committed to a 100 percent no landfill policy, the company refurbishes and sells approximately 90 percent of the equipment it processes; the remaining 10 percent is EPA-compliantly recycled at its Next-Generation IT Demanufacturing and Distribution Center in Las Vegas. U.S. Micro is R2, G.R.A.D.E. (Green Recycling Asset Disposal for the Enterprise), ISO 14001:2004 and Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified. It is also a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher and holds the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2, Type II designation.

U.S. Micro Corporation, a pioneer in IT asset disposition (ITAD), announced the official opening of its brand new $20 million, 130,000 sq. ft. next-generation IT recycling and distribution center in Las Vegas, Nevada. The facility enables U.S. Micro to offer customers an industry leading closed-loop process, from the securing of retired IT equipment and data destruction at the customer’s site to reselling or recycling.

The opening celebration and ribbon cutting will take place on January 11, 2012 at 4 p.m., the week of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Tours will be available during an open house from 3 p.m. until 8 p.m. The facility is located at 7608 West Teco Avenue and media are invited to attend.

This is a significant expansion for the company, which anticipates rapid increase in demand for data destruction and electronics recycling across the $5 billion U.S. industry.

U.S. Micro Warns Companies at CES about Security and Environmental Risks of Data-Rich Devices

As new technology is unveiled during CES, U.S. Micro warns that the proliferation of data-rich devices in the workplace poses significant security and environmental challenges for companies.

Jim Kegley, founder, president and CEO of U.S. Micro said: "Companies need to be concerned about what happens to their retired IT assets. They must consider the impact on their reputation – and ultimately their pocketbook – if data is lost or if old equipment is thrown into a landfill. Too few top executives are aware of how important managing end-of-life IT issues is to their company.

U.S. Micro disposes of more than one million pieces of IT equipment annually and has never had a single data breach.

U.S. Micro Corporation
Since 1995, U.S. Micro Corporation has been a major innovator and leader in enterprise IT data security. Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nev., U.S. Micro serves Fortune 500 companies that demand the highest levels of data security and environmental stewardship. Committed to a 100 percent no landfill policy, the company refurbishes and sells approximately 90 percent of the equipment it processes; the remaining 10 percent is EPA-compliantly recycled at its Next-Generation IT Demanufacturing and Distribution Center in Las Vegas. U.S. Micro is R2, G.R.A.D.E. (Green Recycling Asset Disposal for the Enterprise), ISO 14001:2004 and Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified. It is also a Microsoft Authorized Refurbisher and holds the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2, Type II designation.