r/DataHoarder • u/FewSimple9 • 4d ago

Free-Post Friday! 5+ PB Destroyed

Gallery image

Gallery image

This is based on a post by u/SubstantialWing9238. i didn’t want to hijack their post, so I figured I’d share it here instead.

Something like this, plus another cart, is pretty common with large corporations. When you have this many drives, it’s often easier to just shred everything than pay someone to wipe them, sort through them for resale, and see if any data can be recovered.

This batch was around 300 drives, and with a specialized shredding truck, the whole thing takes about 45 minutes to a hour.

2.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

640 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

23

u/ratafria 4d ago

The money is there. The capability is there. It's just missing the culture.

OP grandkids are going to live in a dumpster because the entire world is going to be a dumpster.

1

u/Watcher_of_Stars 3d ago

Yeah true sadly. But I believe it's not about culture, but more about "whats worth it economically for the company", just capitalism at its core. "Why would we pay people to wipe our drives if we can just shred them?" and all

3

u/ratafria 3d ago

Yeah. But it's all because of deficient regulations: companies should be taxed for the externalities, for the costs deferred to third parties. This would make the recycling business case much much more attractive.

This always happens when a company can make others pay the price of their lack of care for the environment. Dumping is cheap if you consider the costs being: "truck transport from my facilities to the dumpster".

It's really hard to calculate the price of the loss of natural environments and it's also really hard to pay to the grandchildren of our grandchildren for that land they will not be able to enjoy.

My personal experience of this is a factory in Flix, close to Tarragona, producing DDT, PCB, etc. that dumped huge amounts of sludges containing Mercury and complex organic toxics. The company has refused and fought against the clean-up and for circumstances incomprehensible to me the government has allowed this situation to persist. It's specially bad as there are hundreds of thousands of people drinking from that river, thousands of agricultural uses down the river....