SunZag Wins Environmental Awareness Award in Entrepreneurship

San Diego, CA ¨C Team SunZag recently won the R. Michael Pack Award for Environmental Awareness in Entrepreneurship, Venture Challenge 2007. Representing SDSU, the team consists of Mr. Sun, the founder, Maria Sun, an MBA student, and Anders Svensson, a recent MBA graduate. The competition was held in mid-March, with 20 participating teams from universities throughout the US.


With data and identity theft on the rise, and the computer storage industry booming, the company has identified certain needs of consumers in dealing with personal or confidential data. SunZag¡¯s first product, the Disc Eraser, promotes CD recycling instead of shredding. Under development are other products, including the Hard Drive Eraser, the USB uniter, and the Credit Card punch.


The Disc Eraser has been selling online at www.DiscEraser.com. Simple and effective, the product is the first to promote CD recycling by leaving discs physically intact. CDs and DVDs are 100% recyclable, but breaking and shredding confidential discs make recycling very difficult. In order to recycle a CD, the entire metallic foil layer needs to be ¡°washed¡± off the disc, which requires an intact disc. Sorting broken and shredded particles is very difficult, thus the impure material gets dumped as eWaste. The Disc Eraser encourages a better solution - Recycling rather than creating eWaste - which not only makes disc disposal much easier, but also helps to preserve the natural environment.


"Every home and office should have one," writes Phil Baker, technology reviewer for the San Diego Daily Transcript. More practical and affordable than a CD shredder, which start at around $80, the Disc Eraser requires no electricity to operate and sells for only $12.99. Featuring a patent-pending technology, an optical groove is applied at a precise skew location on the disc, which renders the contents unreadable and unrecoverable. The disc can then be disposed of in any plastics recycling bin. Recycling is the current process for non-confidential discs such as AOL, commercial, and outdated software installation discs that are disposed of intact.


Over 20 billion recordable discs have been sold worldwide. In terms of sales, the number of recordable discs surpassed commercial discs back in 2001. In the US alone, over 3 million recordable discs require secure disposal every month. The number is rapidly increasing due to the popularity and the drop in price of CD and DVD burners and blank media. The Disc Eraser is the first device that promotes the recycling of outdated and confidential discs. SunZag will continue to develop data security products that are consumer oriented and environmentally-friendly.