Nearly every digital copier built since 2002 contains a hard drive that stores an image of every document copied, scanned, or emailed by the machine. If you're in the identity theft business it seems this would be a pot of gold.

This past February, CBS News went to a warehouse in New Jersey to see how hard it would be to buy a

Toxic glass from old televisions and computer monitors could pollute landfills if new uses for them are not found soon, scientists warn. Cathode ray tubes, or CRTs, are made of heavy leaded glass, which is categorized as hazardous waste in Europe and most of America.

Fortunately, demand for old CRTs is high in developing nations such as China and India, where they are recycled to create the raw material for building new TVs. But as demand for flat screen TVs increases, the demand for

In 1994, Federal Prison Industries, trade-named UNICOR, started a computer and electronics recycling program in Marianna. Inmates break down and retrieve salvageable computer parts. According to UNICOR's Web site, the products are sold to public and private industries to "save precious resources."

Twenty-six plaintiffs are currently in a federal lawsuit against the prison, claiming ...

Journalism students say they paid $40 in Ghana for a second-hand hard drive that contained information about multi-million-dollar defense contracts between the Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and one of the largest military contractors in the United States.

One of the students said the hard drive was purchased in an open-air market in the coastal town of Tema from a local dealer who bought second-hand hard drives by the cargo load.

The drive contained

After tracking hazardous waste shipments and dumping around the world, a national environmental group has sounded the alarm about a million pounds of old electronics innocently donated in Pennsylvania.

Basel Action Network contends that the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society and Allegheny County, Pa., should have known that a free electronics recycling program was too good to be true. The environmental group

60 Minutes is going to take you to one of the most toxic places on Earth - a place government officials and gangsters don't want you to see. It's a town in China where you can't breathe the air or drink the water, a town where the blood of the children is laced with lead.

Too many employees fail to erase or encrypt sensitive data on their mobile devices before tossing them out, say researchers from British phone company BT Group, the University of Glamorgan in Wales, and Edith Cowan University in Australia.

To prove its point, the team recently purchased 161 discarded handheld devices from online auction sites and secondhand outlets in Britain and Australia. One in five, found the researchers, contained details about salaries, company finances, b

One year ago, Hank Gerbus had his hard drive replaced at a Best Buy store in Cincinnati. Six months ago, he received one of the most disturbing phone calls of his life.

"Mr. Gerbus," Gerbus recalls a stranger named Ed telling him. "I just bought your hard drive in Chicago."

Gerbus, a 77-year-old retiree, was a

When a man with a truck offered to "recycle" a load of old computer monitors in 2001, the University City School District was happy to pay him $5 apiece to be rid of them. So district officials were distressed to learn that some of its equipment has turned up dumped in a once-idyllic place called Echo Valley amid stately cottonwoods and spring daisies.

"When someone tells you they're going to dispose of them properly, yo

PC Disposal is featured in this radio discussion about the growing importance and difficulty of proper computer disposal and recycling.