7. Discard securely when no longer needed

Research records and biological samples should be disposed as confidential wastes at the end of the retention period.

You should use methods that will render these materials unreadable and irrecoverable. For example: ^(9,21,22)

• Papers can be shredded.
• Electronic records on physical storage devices (CDs, tapes, hard drives) can be physically destructed by incineration or permanently erased using specialised software.*
• Electronic records on cloud storage should be permanently deleted following instructions from cloud service providers. 
• Biological residues should be disposed following instructions from the pathology department.
  
  

* Simply ‘deleting’ is usually not sufficient protection against recovery of the file by a skilled computer technician.

Data integrity →