Lecturer: Rike Sandlin
Rivervista Partners LLC
info@rivervistapartners.com
769-218-9825
Highlights:
• Generally, North American businesses take a voluntary approach to standards while European businesses require compliance with government regulations.
• ADISA is one example of a data security standard that has been adopted across Europe.
• R2 is another popular global standard, with over 1,000 certified facilities in North America as well as regions such as Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
• Global enterprises are increasingly requiring consistency across ITAD requirements for risk management.
Rike’s assessment:
Firstly, most of the standards that we talked about are voluntary standards. So, they are something that an ITAD business chooses to follow, or an enterprise chooses to require of their ITAD vendor. That fits well with the US or the North American approach, which is very independent and flexible to meet business needs. In Europe, there’s a much stronger regulatory framework where the governments have certain requirements that must be met. But you still do see adoption of R2, e-Stewards and other standards in Europe. ADISA is a great example where they’ve started in the UK and have expanded across Europe for data security. We go to conferences like the ITAM conference, ASCDI conference or e-Scrap conference and you see people from around the world. The R2 standard has over 1,000 facilities that have been certified to the R2 standard. Most of those are in North America, but there is quite a large group that is in all regions of the world, in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa. And so, it’s exciting to see the adoption of those best practices around the world. We are seeing more global enterprises requiring consistency across their ITAD requirements. They’re allowing less and less flexibility. They say we want consistency to manage our risks around the world.
