mutually assured destruction

I have a large and growing collection of e-waste. One special neighborhood in this zip code of waste is reserved just for dead or dying gadgets that hold my personal information. The pile grows because I don't have good protocols for scrubbing this junk before it heads out the door for its date with an acid bath, a makeshift furnace attended by orphans, or an identity theft gang in Southeast Asia. They don't ask which you prefer at the ewaste drop-off.

My hard drives usually get destroyed. A wifi router might get its settings wiped. I have a harder time with things that seem like they ought to be useful. I recently had four Macs that fit this bill. All worked but none really made any sense as a computer. All were 'modern' Intel Macs though two were 32-bit-only Core Duos. MagSafe plugs were fraying. Batteries shot. Fluorescent backlights dim.

All these Macs had hard drives that are tedious at best to remove for erasure or destruction. Fortunately, all also had FireWire and all supported Apple's fabulous Target Disk Mode. Hold 'T'  at power on and the Mac exports its internal drives to another Mac over FireWire as if they were external disks. I used one of the Macs to wipe the drives of the other three. I installed a clean Mac OS on one of the wiped machines and turned it around to wipe the fourth.

This cyclic graph of destruction was not simply for show. While these Macs all had FireWire, none of my present Mac laptops do. These machines would have to wipe themselves. The arrangement sounds cumbersome but the outcome was ideal. I was able to recycle these machines as working computers rather than as pure waste.

I would be even happier if these Macs, and all phones, tablets, and computers, came with a 'donate me' mode in firmware that could give me some assurance that the device has been actually wiped. An article chosen at random from the Google suggests that these machines might take on average 4000 MJ of energy each to make. A million watt hours. Twenty thousand hours at 50 watts. I don't expect any of my old machines, or phones, could forestall the production of their replacement if re-used. I would still like the best shot at it. Perhaps future revisions of the 'Energy Star' program could include mandates designed to simplify responsible reuse.