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The results were part of a survey undertaken by FT Research on behalf of recycling company Remploy e-cycle. Commenting on the findings, the company's General Manager, Noel Harasyn commented 'Quite frankly, this is deeply disturbing. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they are not rendering the data on hard drives unrecoverable'

The survey found that, of the companies which got rid of old machines - either by giving them to charity, recycling them or simply dumping them in landfill - 21 per cent overwrote the hard disk once and 38 per cent reformatted the hard drive.

In the latter case, the data will still be on the hard disk, it will just not be indexed by the file system. Special tools - and some perseverance will recover the files. Even after overwriting, special magnetic readers can often still read the faint image of the data which has been overwritten. To make data truly unrecoverable with modern techniques

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the data needs to be overwritten seven times. The alternative is to 'degauss' or demagnetise the disk entirely.

In the survey, only 23 percent of the companies who had disposed of computers had overwritten sufficient number of times followed by reformatting or had physically destroyed the drives.

Disposal of obsolete IT kit is becoming a huge worldwide problem. The American Environmental Protection Agency estimates that over the next five years some 250 million PCs will be replaced in the US alone. Whilst the US, under the Bush administration, has been somewhat laissez faire about environmental issues, Americans have woken up to the dangers of identify theft posed by computer equipment containing personal data falling into the wrong hands. There is now a battery of US legislation aimed at protecting personal information including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the Right to Financial Privacy Act and the Gramm Leach Bliley Act.

In Europe, the problem of disposing of old computers will be thrown into focus when the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directive comes into force. The aim of the directive is to reduce the need for landfill sites and change the behaviour of the throwaway economy. It demands that producers of electrical and electronic goods will have to collect unwanted electrical and electronic equipment when the customer has finished with it. The manufacturer will also have to meet tough new recycling and disposable regulations.