Sustainability is a growing concern for many organizations, but enterprise technology continues to be a major contributor to high carbon emissions and other environmental issues. E-waste has a range of negative effects for organizations as well as the environment. Improper device disposal can be hazardous to human health and contribute to toxic landfills. To prevent these consequences and reap some additional benefits, organizations should put thought into how they approach IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) and prioritize recycling. You can read more about this story here:
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Very interesting article with useful explanatory graphics.
I like it, except for one small technical point: for us in the ITAD industry “Recycling” means Recycling - that is the separation of all the materials, alloys, metals, plastics, gold, platinum etc sometimes by fragmentation. Recycling (by definition) destroys the original asset and no “Re-use” is possible.
Other technical terms
We also differentiate between:
“Refurbish” - a datawipe and cosmetic external clean,
“Rebuild” – dismantle, extreme clean (dust is an insulator; it makes components run hotter, slower and break down more quickly), repair, rebuild (renewing all connections between components and thermal paste on processor).
“Upgrade” – add extra RAM, change rotary mechanical drives to solid state drives, add full high-res graphics cards where there are slots available, improve cooling, etc.
“Remanufacture” - dismantle, extreme clean, repair, rebuild with new plastic body and keyboard (renewing all connections between components and thermal paste on processor).
From our follow-up ad-hoc research over many years we have found that normal “refurbishing” does not deliver any working life extension (as it only involves datawiping and external cosmetic cleaning) and “remanufacturing” delivers a 5 year life extension, but results in 60% of the CO2 emissions incurred in making new devices in the remanufacturing process.
We have found that “rebuilding” is the optimum, incurring less than 5% CO2 emissions in the process compared to new manufacturing and doubling their working lives from 5 to 10 years.