REAV

Glossary

Chain of custody

The unbroken, documented record of who held a device, when, and what was done to it, from collection to final disposition.

Chain of custody is the audit trail of physical possession. Each transfer, pickup, transport, reception, workshop, storage, sale or destruction, is recorded with a time, a place and a responsible party, so that no period is unaccounted for.

For IT equipment it does double duty. It supports data-protection claims, because a device that cannot be located cannot be proven wiped, and it supports environmental reporting, because treatment claims depend on knowing what actually arrived.

The weak points are predictable: transport between sites, reception when volume spikes, and any step recorded on paper or in a spreadsheet. A chain of custody is only as strong as its worst-documented handover, which is why serious operations key every movement to the device serial number and capture it at the moment it happens rather than reconstructing it afterwards.

Related terms

  • Erasure certificate The auditable record proving that all data on a specific device was destroyed, by a named method, at a known date.
  • ITAD The controlled process of retiring IT equipment so that data is destroyed, value is recovered and disposal is documented.
  • Reverse logistics The flow that moves goods backwards | from the user toward collection, inspection, repair, resale or recycling.
  • ESPR & Digital Product Passport The EU framework that sets ecodesign requirements per product group and attaches a machine-readable Digital Product Passport to each item.

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