Tackling the growing mountain of business e‑waste

British busi­ness­es are har­bour­ing a vast amount of poten­tial e‑waste, the catch-all term for any item requir­ing a bat­tery or an elec­tri­cal plug. The list includes com­put­ers, screens, phones, print­ers, scan­ners, pho­to­copiers, fridges, microwaves, ket­tles, smoke detec­tors and secu­ri­ty cam­eras. That’s a lot of items with finite lifes­pans scat­tered around com­mer­cial premis­es nation­wide. 

When­ev­er a firm needs to dis­pose of such goods, it must com­ply with the Waste Elec­tri­cal and Elec­tron­ic Equip­ment Reg­u­la­tions 2013 (WEEE), as the tox­ic mate­ri­als these items typ­i­cal­ly con­tain present a seri­ous pol­lu­tion risk. Many prod­ucts will hold sen­si­tive data, so this will also need to be secure­ly wiped before their dis­pos­al. 

Accord­ing to The Glob­al E‑Waste Mon­i­tor 2020, a research report pub­lished by the Unit­ed Nations Uni­ver­si­ty, the UK became the world’s sec­ond-largest pro­duc­er of e‑waste per capi­ta (23.9kg) after Nor­way in 2019. The glob­al aver­age for the year was 7.3kg per capi­ta. 

While that fig­ure includes both domes­tic and com­mer­cial waste, most experts believe that the lat­ter ele­ment will con­tin­ue to increase as British firms adopt more and more tech to aid their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tions. The pan­dem­ic may also prove to be a fac­tor, because many firms have bought new devices to enable staff to work at home, leav­ing exist­ing equip­ment to gath­er dust in desert­ed offices. 

In Sep­tem­ber 2020, data era­sure spe­cial­ist Blanc­co com­mis­sioned a sur­vey of 600 senior deci­sion-mak­ers in large firms in the UK, the US, Ger­many, France and Japan. Near­ly half (47%) of the respon­dents said that their firms had been oblig­ed to cre­ate new roles to deal specif­i­cal­ly with e‑waste prob­lems aris­ing from the Covid cri­sis, such as the need to ensure organ­i­sa­tion-wide WEEE com­pli­ance. Despite this, many com­pa­nies are still mis­han­dling their unwant­ed equip­ment, accord­ing to Blancco’s vice-pres­i­dent of enter­prise and cloud era­sure solu­tions, Fredrik Forslund.

“They lack prop­er aware­ness when deal­ing with end-of-life IT equip­ment and their approach­es are unsus­tain­able,” he argues. “Accord­ing to our research, more than a third of enter­pris­es destroy their used assets because they believe that it’s bet­ter for the envi­ron­ment. But this shred­ded refuse only adds to the grow­ing e‑waste issue.” 

Forslund con­tin­ues: “Fol­low­ing data era­sure, those devices could be repur­posed, resold or recy­cled. They could pro­vide afford­able options for sec­ond-hand pur­chasers, for instance, or they could be safe­ly donat­ed to organ­i­sa­tions and com­mu­ni­ties that need IT equip­ment most, cre­at­ing sus­tain­able jobs in the refur­bish­ment of elec­tri­cal com­po­nents.” 

Taking responsibility

While the users of elec­tri­cal equip­ment need to edu­cate them­selves in end-of-life man­age­ment, man­u­fac­tur­ers must also step up their game. There are still few for­mal pro­grammes in exis­tence for return­ing and recy­cling prod­ucts they make, for instance. 

“Respon­si­bil­i­ty falls on the firms cre­at­ing these prod­ucts, as well as the busi­ness lead­ers who buy them,” says Xavier Bat­tinger, direc­tor of busi­ness devel­op­ment at Ricoh Indus­trie France. “Tech­nol­o­gy sup­pli­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers should ensure that all prod­uct parts are designed and built in a way that enables them to be recy­cled or reused. A sophis­ti­cat­ed return and recy­cling process is key for opti­mal resource recov­ery. Ide­al­ly, these will be free and easy to use, as well as clear­ly doc­u­ment­ed to encour­age max­i­mum adop­tion.”

Joe Bag­u­ley, chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer of Cloud com­put­ing firm VMware in EMEA, agrees that the prob­lem requires a coor­di­nat­ed solu­tion. His com­pa­ny has made bring­ing the amount of e‑waste its oper­a­tions send to land­fill down to zero one of its strate­gic goals. 

“We rig­or­ous­ly man­age our IT assets. This includes the respon­si­bil­i­ty of dis­pos­ing of our e‑waste prop­er­ly,” he says. “Reduc­ing the amount of elec­tron­ic waste build­ing up glob­al­ly, as well as the car­bon foot­print cre­at­ed in trans­port­ing it and dis­pos­ing of it, remains a mas­sive hur­dle that must be bal­anced against the increas­ing­ly insa­tiable demand of con­sumers to have the next new thing.” 

Bag­u­ley con­tin­ues: “The tech­nol­o­gy indus­try must not be blink­ered when it comes to address­ing the chal­lenges of man­ag­ing e‑waste. Improv­ing com­pa­ny-spe­cif­ic oper­a­tions to tack­le the issue is absolute­ly nec­es­sary and should be cham­pi­oned, espe­cial­ly in glob­al organ­i­sa­tions.”

Driving long-term change

In August 2020, more than 1,000 cor­po­rate IT deci­sion-mak­ers across north­ern Europe were sur­veyed on behalf of 3stepIT, which works with busi­ness­es to find uses for obso­lete or unwant­ed tech. Well over a third (37%) of respon­dents couldn’t say where their firms’ e‑waste was end­ing up, while 10% admit­ted that they were still con­sign­ing unwant­ed items to land­fill.

“Busi­ness­es need to reduce car­bon emis­sions and answer calls from their work­ers and con­sumers for green­er prac­tices,” says 3stepIT’s CEO, Car­men Ene. “But they also need to replen­ish aging tech­nol­o­gy to keep pace with demands for greater per­for­mance and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, par­tic­u­lar­ly as we move to hybrid work­ing. What’s need­ed is a bet­ter solu­tion to man­age the IT life­cy­cle based on the prin­ci­ples of the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. Busi­ness­es need to switch from a ‘take, make, dis­pose’ mod­el to a ‘take, make, reuse or recy­cle’ mind­set.”

While reduc­ing e‑waste is good for the envi­ron­ment, it also makes busi­ness sense. Research by Cir­cu­lar Com­put­ing shows that the UK could save £7.7bn over the next nine years by buy­ing refur­bished lap­tops instead of new devices. This would also save 9 mil­lion tonnes of car­bon emis­sions, equiv­a­lent to tak­ing 193,002 cars off the roads for a year, claims the study. 

“The good news is that there are more bril­liant and fea­si­ble sus­tain­able solu­tions than ever – and it‘s not rock­et sci­ence for board­rooms to imple­ment change,” says Cir­cu­lar Computing’s head of sus­tain­abil­i­ty and social inclu­sion, Steve Haskew. “The chal­lenge seems to be more in chang­ing behav­iour.” 

The first step, he adds, is for com­pa­nies to take own­er­ship of the prob­lem and “ensure that some­one senior has mean­ing­ful respon­si­bil­i­ty for mea­sure­ment and improve­ment. Organ­i­sa­tions also need to kick arbi­trary pro­cure­ment habits. So many firms replace their tech­nol­o­gy on a three-year cycle, replac­ing slight­ly used with brand new for no oth­er rea­son than it’s how they’ve always done it.”

Haskew does believe that most busi­ness­es are at least acknowl­edg­ing that e‑waste is a prob­lem to be tak­en seri­ous­ly. “It’s the increas­ing impor­tance that employ­ees and oth­er stake­hold­ers are plac­ing on sus­tain­abil­i­ty that will real­ly dri­ve change and make a sig­nif­i­cant impact,” he pre­dicts.