Surplex UK Limited holds data-bearing media in a strong room built to BS EN 1143-1, the standard that classifies secure storage units by their resistance to attack.

It is an attack-tested, insurance-grade vault designed to withstand professional mechanical and thermal tools, where many recyclers store drives in open warehouse cages. The media cannot be reached between arrival and final destruction.

NIST 800-88 is the recognised guideline for media sanitisation, and it requires a defined process of overwriting, verifying and documenting rather than a single pass.

Standard wiping can leave recoverable traces behind. Surplex UK Limited works to NIST 800-88 and evidences it against each device serial number, which is what turns a claim into assurance.

Surplex UK Limited uses its own vetted drivers rather than third-party couriers, and provides foam-lined secure transit cases at the door.

Remote collections are where a chain of custody usually breaks. This keeps it unbroken from the employee’s desk to the processing centre.

Yes. Surplex UK Limited brings a mobile shredder to your facility, so your team can watch hard drives, solid-state media and tapes destroyed to 6mm particles before anything leaves the premises.

This is the usual route where an auditor requires visual verification.

Most customers find their collection is free, and there is no minimum quantity. Surplex UK Limited works on an open-book value-offset model, so the value recovered from your redundant hardware is set against the cost of collection, destruction and recycling, and you are shown both figures. Where the recovered value does not cover the work, a small logistics and processing fee is payable, quoted and agreed upfront before anything leaves your site. Destruction to NIST 800-88 and BS EN 15713:2023 is included either way.

Very likely. Surplex UK Limited collects and destroys hard drives across England, Wales and Scotland, with dedicated pages for London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff and the Thames Valley. On-site shredding brings the mobile unit to your premises, so proximity to one of our sites matters less than it would with a drop-off service. There is no minimum quantity, so a single drive is booked the same way as a pallet.

On-site destruction means the mobile unit shreds the drives at your premises and the data never leaves the building. Off-site means the media travels under GPS-tracked transport to our Gloucester processing centre and is destroyed there. Both are carried out to BS EN 15713:2023 and both produce a certificate of destruction against each device serial number. On-site is usually chosen where a policy forbids data leaving the site, or where someone wants to witness it.

Yes. Solid state drives, memory cards and other flash media are shredded mechanically, the Destroy method defined by NIST 800-88. This matters because degaussing only affects magnetic media and has no effect on an SSD, so a magnetic method alone leaves solid state data intact. Surplex UK Limited shreds both, and where value is recovered from hardware, data is erased with Certus certified software to the NIST 800-88 Purge method instead.

Destruction is carried out to BS EN 15713:2023, which sets maximum particle sizes by material category, and NCSC guidance on secure sanitisation describes destructive sanitisation as reducing media to particles of 6mm or less. We confirm the category and the size that applies to your media before the collection, so the specification is agreed rather than assumed.