destruction
n.
A disposal process that results in the obliteration of records.
Notes
At a minimum, destruction may be no more complicated than placing materials in the trash for transfer to a landfill. In other instances, the manner of destruction is appropriate to the sensitivity of the information contained in the materials and may involve shredding, maceration, or incineration. For electronic records, simple destruction may be accomplished by deleting the record, which merely removes the pointer from an index without overwriting the data. For sensitive information in electronic format, the media may be overwritten numerous time or physically destroyed to make it impossible to recover the data.
