Leveraging Your IT Assets to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

As a large organization, you have heavily invested in a range of IT assets such as laptops, mobile phones, storage devices, and printers. Purchase and use of such  devices has already contributed significantly to your company’s carbon footprint. Meanwhile, at every stage of your supply chain, activities are adding to your organization’s overall carbon footprint. How can you minimize additional carbon emissions using the assets you already have? Here are two ways to achieve this.

Refurbish old devices and resell them

All electronic devices have a short shelf life. Suppose your laptops are old and sluggish and no longer useful for your employees, but they still have a heartbeat. Refurbish such laptops and other devices and resell them. This reduces the number of devices that need to be manufactured to meet market needs. There are markets that will buy such low cost refurbished products. Refurbishing old devices reduces large scale mining for raw material to produce such devices, bringing down carbon emissions.

Reuse parts of devices as raw material
When devices are no longer usable, metal, and other parts of such devices can be harvested and recycled to produce new devices. For example, OEMs will buy crushed metal from old laptops to manufacture new laptops. This reduces the load on the environment by bringing down the amount of mining required to produce new devices.
It is imperative for companies to look for ways and means to create sustainable practices as part of their corporate social responsibility. Across your organization’s entire supply chain, there will be multiple opportunities to recycle, repair, or refurbish your assets to minimize carbon emissions and help the environment. Such approaches can help your organization reduce carbon impact by claiming carbon credit due to recycling and reuse.

Want to know more about how to dispose or refurbish your IT assets and claim carbon credit while also complying to standards such as R2 Version 3 Appendix B and NIST ? Contact us.