INDUSTRY INTELLIGENCE
or their customers to facilitate asset reuse or recycling . Manufacturers , therefore , remain vested in selling ‘ net new ’ rather than conserving or extending the life of existing hardware equipment .
Such wastage is amplified by a prevailing strategy to minimise the cost associated with IT disposal rather than find ways of maximising reclamation of components and precious rare earth metals which are in finite supply . Adding to the growing e-waste mountain is the conventional approach to secure disposal of data which all too often results in the destruction of serviceable hard drives . There are proven , secure and compliant software solutions available for wiping old data rather than wholesale hardware destruction .
An inconvenient truth
Therefore , any data centre striving to meet its own decarbonisation goals and obligations cannot do so singlehandedly . It is largely beholden to the supply chain stakeholders upstream who need to do much more concerning the longevity and reusability of equipment . At the same time data centre customers / users and their lease finance providers need to be encouraged to accept and enable longer usage periods through regular maintenance programmes , refurbishment , resell and reuse . All concerned must pursue ethical and sustainable product end-of-life recycling practices .
In this regard , engaging the services of licensed and regulated WEE IT asset disposal ( ITAD ) operators can extend typical three-to-five-year product lifetimes by as much as another five years . Materials recovered such as gold , copper and steel can go back into manufacturing streams and once again become part of the technology manufacturing process , completely closing the life cycle loop .
Clearly , a key success factor in effectively closing the loop is a more sustainable and ethical method of extraction and recovery of PCB materials .
To address this , bioleaching , an arm of biotechnology that uses bacteria to oxidise and leach out the metal content , is emerging as a potential game-changer – and an area which our sister company , Bioscope Technologies , is pioneering . The PCB materials are being reclaimed , conserved and recycled without the use of harmful acids .
Granular reporting
Underpinning any circular IT solution must be the ability to accurately measure and audit the entire Scope 3 CO₂e life cycle for IT at the asset level . For users and data centres , the equipment usage and post-usage stages of equipment life cycle management are the only ways of reclaiming and redressing the energy expended during the IT equipment manufacturing phase .
Until recently there has not been a data lake available that joins all these life cycles together to enable organisations to form a net zero position . This is changing with the emergence of granular reporting tools that provide a full understanding of the environmental position . These will enable data centre owners and operators to drive decisions that support their own sustainability reduction targets as well as inform those of their customers – from equipment procurement to retention and at the disposal stage .
In summary , as the focal point for the enablement of enterprise IT , colocation , cloud computing and carrier connectivity – in fact , the very pillar of the digital economy – the data centre industry is ideally placed to take a much more active role in decarbonising the tech industry , in lobbying manufacturers and canvassing customers about the necessity and benefits of dissing conventional linear practices in favour of circular IT life cycle management and recycling solutions . Such an approach will not only help decarbonise data centres but the entire supply chain and help conserve precious resources . �
The pre-use manufacturing phase accounts for 70 – 90 % of hardware equipment ’ s total embodied carbon . The virgin precious metals and rare earths being mined for use in PCB manufacture and their subsequent extraction at end-of-life through acids or smelting accounts for the majority of this . A PCB can contain over 40 of these including gold , copper , silver and palladium . The UN puts the value of wasted rare and precious metals contained on PCBs at US $ 62.5 billion per year .
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