Very few items have such high liability for owners as tape and hard disk storage media. Whether it is company secrets, personal information, medical information, credit card transactions or financial data, information is a hot commodity and the vast majority of it by far is stored on some type of magnetic media. One hard drive could contain more than $10 million in fines for a variety of privacy and ethics laws! Information that is critical to the operation of our infrastructure such as power, traffic and phone could be compromised by simple theft of an inoperable hard drive. Stolen personal information for sale is already a mega billion dollar industry.
There are two fool-proof ways to eliminate hard disk and tape data, incineration and degaussing. Incineration subjects magnetic media to over 2,000º C which returns the magnetic field to zero and vaporizes much of the drive leaving only raw metals. In the United States, heavy incineration for metals and smelting operations have almost ceased for environmental reasons.