NAID initiative meets with initial success in New Jersey Senate

The National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), Phoenix, says its initiative to remove restrictions that limit mobile shredders from offering hard drive destruction in New Jersey has reached an important milestone.

Monday, June 15, 2015, NAID’s proposed legislation to remove the environmental licensing requirement for companies shredding hard drives passed a bipartisan New Jersey Senate committee by a unanimous vote. The proposed amendment to current legislation faced opposition from some industry business leaders; however, it received support by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and several environmental groups that also were present at the hearing, NAID says.

Recently, the association says, this proposed amendment also gained sponsors in the New Jersey State Assembly and Senate.

New Jersey is the only state in the United States that requires a state-level environmental license to shred hard drives, NAID says. Many stakeholders, including NAID, say the state’s position on this issue is unnecessarily restrictive, with NAID adding that the state requirement interferes with many financial and health care organizations’ policies on the destruction of media containing personally identifiable information (PII).

According to NAID, the New Jersey DEP says destruction of hard drives in any manner is considered “processing;” hard drives, which are a form of “consumer electronics,” are considered “universal waste.” For these reasons, the New Jersey DEP has ruled, “Processing of consumer electronics whether as a permanent or mobile shredding requires a general or limited Class D Recycling Center Approval,” NAID reports on its website. (For an earlier news items on this topic, please click here.)

“NAID has always maintained that the decision between mobile service providers and plant-based service providers is a customer preference,” NAID CEO Bob Johnson says. “The association’s willingness and capability to act in these situations is an important part of this legislation’s success. Often, we’re the only ones doing so, which is exactly what happened here where we are defending the rights of mobile service providers.”

NAID is a nonprofit trade association of the secure destruction industry, currently representing more than 1,900 member locations globally.