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Blancco Wins 2024 SEAL Business Sustainability Award

Blancco’s victory in the Sustainable Service category recognizes the company for its leadership role in efforts to mitigate the e-waste crisis

AUSTIN and LONDON– May 7, 2024—Blancco Technology Group, the industry standard in data erasure and mobile lifecycle solutions, today announced that Blancco has been named a winner in the 2024 SEAL Business Sustainability Awards, an awards-driven environmental advocacy organization honoring Sustainability, Environmental Achievement, and Leadership (SEAL). Spanning various categories, the honorees, or “ESG Leaders,” as SEAL Awards designates them, range from household brand names—such as Blancco partner Lenovo and others including Qualcomm, Sephora, British Airways and Disneyworld—to high-growth start-ups and scale-ups.

Blancco’s win is in the Sustainable Service category, which recognizes innovative services that set a new standard for sustainability. Award applicants are judged on impact metrics, uniqueness and innovation, and ability to inspire sustainable change. This is Blancco’s second SEAL award win.

“Integration and Impact are the watchwords of the 2024 SEAL Sustainability Awards. This year, we’ve seen an impressive synthesis of technology, design, and innovation combined to drive sustainable impact,” commented Matt Harney, Chairperson and Founder of SEAL Awards. “Alongside the critical need for organizations to dedicate real investment and human capital into ESG, the holistic approach of these award winners is imperative to keep driving progress.”

“Being recognized as an ESG leader validates one of our core values: to act as environmental stewards and safeguard the future of our planet by eliminating processes and practices that are unsustainable,” said Jon Mellon,President of Global Sales, Marketing and Field Operations at Blancco. “The UN’s 2024 Global E-waste Monitor revealed that a record 62 billion KG of e-waste was produced in 2022 with e-waste generation outpacing formal recycling by 5x. Strong e-waste reforms and new strategies to circumvent challenges arising from inadequate formal recycling of IT equipment and devices must become a top priority. Blancco’s certified data erasure processes and solutions enable organizations to reuse more equipment, eliminating the need in many cases for physical destruction of operational assets holding sensitive data.”

With a 25-year history of innovating in the area of software-based data destruction, Blancco is leading the charge to help organizations change their mindsets about physically destroying IT data storage equipment, whether computers, drives, smartphones, or other digital devices. Instead, the company focuses on embracing the circular economy with data security at the forefront. This includes incorporating the safe reuse, resale, or recommissioning of IT assets as a salient component of company ESG strategies.

Blancco’s 2023 ESG report cites its record-setting rise in securely erasing sensitive data from computers, servers and drives as a key factor in contributing to a sustainable, circular economy. Specifically:

• Blancco’s data sanitization software was used to erase 63.8M devices, an increase of 11.02M IT assets from the previous year. This equates to 107 million kilograms (236 million lbs.) of IT devices—about the weight of 583 jumbo jets—being prevented from potentially entering landfills.
• The pre-use carbon footprint of those devices—the total emissions produced from their creation to first use—is approximately 8.3 billion kilograms, a substantial amount that would otherwise be used to create new devices.
• The data management best practices Blancco advocates also help organizations decrease their overall carbon footprint by reducing energy consumption stemming from data storage.

Blancco-sanitized devices can then be reused, recycled, donated or sold through the secondary market. For example, Blancco partners with The Turing Trust, a UK charity that provides IT resources and training to schools in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2016, a mere 3% of Malawian schools had access to an IT lab; now, thanks to the Trust’s initiative, 81% of schools in the country have access to devices that support the IT curriculum primarily for children in secondary education.

Outside of Malawi, the Trust has also delivered containers of computers to children in Liberia, South Sudan, Kenya, Ghana and The Gambia, and has also provided support for Ukrainian refugees in the UK. Blancco supports the initiative with free licenses of its drive eraser software, which enables the charity to not only securely refurbish donated IT equipment (desktops, laptops, smart phones, and tablets), but also to provide assurances to enterprises donating the equipment that their data will not be compromised. To date, Blancco has securely erased over 10,000 donated devices in collaboration with the charity.

Added Mellon: “Across our customers and partners to date, we’ve seen more than half a billion devices erased and reused, however, we are only at the beginning of our journey of what can be achieved.”

With 40+ patented or patent-pending ideas fueling the company’s proprietary technology, Blancco provides organizations with secure and automated solutions that enforce compliance and completely eliminate sensitive and proprietary data (when no longer needed). Blancco’s solutions have been tested, certified, approved and recommended by 13+ governing bodies and leading organizations around the world. No other data erasure software can attest to this level of compliance with the rigorous requirements set by government agencies, legal authorities, and independent testing laboratories.

Blancco also provides customers with a 100% tamper-proof audit trail validating compliance with global data protection and privacy regulations. The company’s ability to provide assurances of data destruction enables enterprises to transition to the circular economy by eliminating the need to physically destroy functional assets for data security purposes.

For a full list of sustainability and security awards Blancco has won as the best data erasure software, please visit blancco.com/awards.

About Blancco Technology Group
Reduce Risk. Increase Efficiency. Be Sustainable.

Blancco Technology Group provides organizations with secure, compliant, and automated solutions that accelerate the transition to the circular economy. Each year, tens of millions of Blancco erasures allow top-tier organizations to protect end-of-life data against unauthorized access, safely redeploy data storage assets, and firmly comply with increased data protection and privacy requirements. Our precise device diagnostics help move used IT assets confidently into the circular economy, enabling enterprises, IT asset disposition (ITAD) vendors and recyclers, and mobile industry stakeholders to operate more sustainably.

Globally approved, recommended and certified by governing and industry bodies around the world, Blancco is the industry standard in data erasure and mobile lifecycle solutions. With 40+ patented or patent-pending ideas, we continue to grow the number of innovative solutions global companies can rely on to accelerate operations, secure their data, and grow their businesses. Read more about us at blancco.com.

About the SEAL Awards

SEAL (Sustainability, Environmental Achievement & Leadership) Awards is an environmental advocacy organization that honors leadership through our business sustainability awards & environmental journalism awards while funding research and pursuing our own environmental impact campaigns. The SEAL Awards’ core pillars are:

• Business Sustainability Awards – honors the most sustainable companies in the world, like Adidas, AMD, Cisco, and Tide
• Environmental Journalism Awards – representative past winners include journalists from Guardian, New York Times, and Grist
• Impact Campaigns – representative campaigns include “#UpTheCup” and “Eco Rewards”
• Environmental Research Grants

Contacts

CCgroup for Blancco Technology Group (International)
Adam Millar
T: +44 (0)20 3824 9200
E: blancco@ccgrouppr.com

CCgroup for Blancco Technology Group (North America)
Natasha Grach / Lori Scribner
T: +1 619 798 0043
E: blancco@ccgrouppr.com