Dealing with e-waste

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Few industries embrace obsolescence by design as much as the IT sector. The same fax machines, copiers and telephones may be semi-permanent fixtures in many companies, but workers will see at least a couple of PCs cross their desks before they leave.

Waste Electrical Equipment (WEE) legislation soon to be come into effect in the UK will require vendors to offer take-back schemes, but many of the larger ones are doing it already. HP recycled 84 million pounds of hardware in the EMEA region last year, for example.

Dell operates a take-back scheme too, but EMEA take-back and recycling manager Jean Cox-Kearns is a little more candid about the operation's success. "I'd be comfortable saying that take-back is still in single digits as a percentage of what's being sold," she admits. "There aren't many donations from smaller companies."

Larger firms are likely to be more organized about the disposal of equipment, just as they are about procurement. Smaller companies are likely to use their equipment for longer, shrugs Cox-Kearns. It begs the question: what's happening to over 90% of the PCs being sold each year when they reach end of life? And what can companies do to get rid of it effectively?

Much will depend on your goals. For some firms, corporate social responsibility will top the agenda. Others will just want to get rid of it as cheaply as possible, or even to make a fast buck. "What we're finding is that some companies are mandated to not spend money on this, and in fact to actually either make money on it or to make sure that it's taken for free," says Shauna McCaffrey, executive director of Renewed Computer Technology (RCT), a Canadian non-profit company that handles charitable donations and recycling as part of a wider federal PC reuse scheme. "We're spending a lot of time educating people in terms of please doing it properly even if you don't use us."

Motivation for disposing of e-waste

Most corporate takeback schemes today emphasise recycling, but according to Tim Jenkins, ICT officer at the Powys-based Centre for Alternative Technology, this may not be the best route after all.

"The whole green movement tried so hard to communicate the concept of recycling to people, but now we're trying to get across the idea that we probably made a mistake on that," says Jenkins. From an environmental perspective, recycling strategies for PCs that have been used by a single customer don't highlight the cost of consumption, he says. Manufacturing PCs is a high energy-intensive process, so frequent consumption of new ones is itself an environmental hazard. Instead of recycling, it's better to both extend your own refresh cycles and hand them down to other users, he says.

"That's considerably better than those machines going for recycling, where there will be some recovery of raw material but it will be fairly low grade," he says, adding that the energy consumption during the recycling process can be significant.

Depending on the brand, those companies wanting to take his advice can resell their old equipment back to the manufacturer. "If the equipment is quite new then we can buy it back from you and refurbish it and resell it, and if there's any residual value that goes back to the customer," says Kirstie McIntyre who is part of HP's UK environmental team. Dell will also refurbish and resell equipment.

Other options include selling PCs through a broker. Companies with different types of equipment could also consider selling it off second hand at auction. Drug discovery firm Inpharmatica, recently announced is forthcoming acquisition by Galapagos, another pharmaceutical firm - a deal that has bought the usual staff rationalisation. "We had 120 employees and 30Tb of disk storage space, but then we downsized," explains Robert Readman, who suddenly found himself IT manager for the company when the IT department was slashed from 30 employees to two.

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