EDITOR’S QUESTION
(CGs). These are raw materials that are
of great technological and economic
importance and whose supply is
vulnerable to interruption.
“CEDaCI facilitates the creation of
a circular economy for data centres
in North-West Europe. This circular
economy reduces the impact of data
centres on the environment. We need to
recover more raw materials, reduce the
use of new raw materials and develop a
safe and economically healthy chain for
critical raw materials.”
Currently, only 10% of critical raw
materials are recycled and recovered.
CEDaCI wants to increase this to 40% for
the baseline (107 tonnes) at the end of the
project in 2021.
ROBBERT HOEFFNAGEL,
GREEN IT AMSTERDAM
nly 10% of the so-called
‘critical raw materials’
used in data centres are
recovered. To reduce the
impact of data centres
on the environment, the
percentage of devices and materials that
are re-used or recycled will have to be
drastically increased.
O
This is the reason for the creation of
a research programme called CEDaCI
– its focus is circular models for data
centres. Organisations from the four main
data centre countries in Europe – the
Netherlands, Germany, France and the UK
– are participating in the project.
“North-West Europe – and in particular the
UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands
– is the EU’s data centre hotspot,” said
Julie Chenadec, Project Manager at
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
THIS CIRCULAR
ECONOMY
REDUCES THE
IMPACT OF DATA
CENTRES ON THE
ENVIRONMENT.
Green IT Amsterdam. “Servers and other
hardware in data centres often have a
replacement period of one to five years.
This contributes substantially to the
production of 11.8 megaton WEEE per
year. These four letters stand for Waste
Electrical & Electronic Equipment. This
makes WEEE one of the fastest growing
waste streams in the European Union.
Waste contains critical raw materials
Both the speed and volume of growth of
‘digital waste’ is unprecedented, but this
is not accompanied by the development
of a recycling infrastructure. Moreover,
the reuse of components, as well as the
recycling and reuse of materials, is low.
Chenadec continued: “Currently,
recycling of WEEE in North-West Europe
is limited to 26.9% in the UK, 26.3% in
France, 36.9% in Germany and 38.1%
in the Netherlands. A large part of the
remaining equipment is exported and
reprocessed or sent to landfills. These
exports waste millions of tonnes of
valuable resources from this sector every
year or are no longer accessible, while
some of these substances are dangerous
and have harmful effects on the
environment and the living environment.
Yet these materials are often simply
considered as ‘waste’. It is important
that these critical raw materials remain
available or become available for reuse,
precisely because access to them is
threatened and substitution by other
materials is currently not feasible.”
The CEDaCI project aims to highlight the
importance of the circular economy in
data centres.
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