Green Computing: Part 1

In the first of two articles looking at the environmental impact of business computing, IT PRO looks at the resurgent market for recycling and refurbishing PCs for business.

By Gary Flood, 17 Jan 2007 at 16:07

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Click here to read part two of this feature.

As interest grows in 'green' computing and awareness of the environmental impact of IT (power usage, recycling of materials) rises, IT directors need to address the knock-on effects of IT resources on the carbon footprint of the business.

One straightforward option, albeit an alien one to most IT departments, is to stop buying so much brand new kit and make more use of older stuff.

Hardly a radical idea - it is one most households bar Premiership footballers' follow, after all. But for some reason the market for refurbished IT equipment, be that servers, PCs, or networking hardware, has never been that big.

This is surprising when you start looking at some of the economics at work in the market. Why do we need to buy new for each and every project? As an economy, we are spending a lot of money on hardware, and sheer common sense suggests trimming that in whatever means has to be beneficial. Data from the London Business School for instance suggests the UK networking equipment market will grow six per cent per year to $4bn (£2.2bn) by the end of 2008, and our bill for servers will hit $3bn (£1.65bn) in the same time frame.

Hardware lifecycles

What is the lifetime of the average enterprise class server or router? On 'the side of the tin' it might say three years but the reality is probably more like five - and why shouldn't equipment once right for mission-critical functions slip easily into second line work if still functional?

Actually, a lot more refurbishing goes on than you might think - it's just not that structured a process. "A lot of great kit came on the market after the dot com bust in 2001, when you could pick up a $2m server for $100,000," points out Simon Forge, a Partner at Ptak, Noel & Associates, an analyst organisation that has recently started tracking the refurbished market in depth. "As a result a lot more CIOs are open to this way of purchasing, but it's taken time to get completely established."

Few companies specialise in just sourcing and reselling refurbished kit but one of the most prominent is US outfit Word Data Products, or WDPI, which has been in the business for some 20 years. The company has sales of around $700m, purely from refurbished hardware.

In November it released a survey of 200 UK IT directors and managers in what it claimed were large organisations that suggested a modicum of interest in recycling and redeploying pre-owned equipment. In that survey, 47 per cent of those polled said their company now uses a recycling/refurbishment specialist to dispose of redundant and terminated IT and networking hardware. A surprisingly large group in this sample, 40 per cent, report having a formal policy in place for re-using existing IT and networking equipment while a quarter of companies surveyed are currently using refurbished IT or networking equipment.

There is of course the related aspect to greener sourcing that a company can dump its own end-of-life equipment into this market, instead of just landfilling it or passing it on to the charity sector: with, hopefully, some return on all that investment. According to the WDPI survey 13 per cent of organisations literally just take their old stuff to the council tip (and 30 per cent send redundant kit to a charity or offload kit via a donation). Thus 47 per cent of this survey group acknowledge that passing on their no-longer-needed devices can get them money back or help with the cost of buying new stuff, and 54 per cent can see value in sourcing second-hand hardware to ease the cost of equipping non-core tasks like software testing.