How to find—and grab—the low-hanging fruit when it comes to your sustainability strategy
Company News | Sep 6, 2024
The great thing about corporate sustainability planning—and arguably the toughest thing—is that you can come at it in a hundred different ways. You can use renewable materials for your packaging instead of plastic, you can re-engineer products so they’re more easily repaired, you can buy energy from providers that leverage renewable technologies, you can use Power over Ethernet to reduce power consumption, you can install smart thermostats. Truly the only limit is your imagination.
But some of this…maybe even most of this…is a heavy lift. It’s no small thing to rewire an entire building or reconfigure products to make them more easily repaired. And the costs can be formidable.
So how can you make meaningful progress in the short term while planning and budgeting for projects that will take longer and cost more?
The short answer: Talk to your IT department.
Why?
Because your IT department purchases and disposes of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of products every year to keep your company running, and the way they choose to do that can greatly impact your carbon footprint.
How can you tell if they’re already running an operation optimized for sustainability?
Just ask a few questions, like: When they need servers, routers, or switches for a new project do they simply order them, or do they review their own asset inventory first to determine whether there are un- or under-utilized products that can be repurposed for the new project? If so, how do they do that? Can they show you? Do they know where all of your inventory is at all times and how it’s being utilized?
Once they’ve identified the number of products they really need, do they go straight to a vendor to get them, or do they see if OEM-certified refurbished equipment is available?
And when these products reach end of life, does your IT organization scrap them without being entirely sure where they end up, or are they working with a company that provides verified zero-landfill recycling?
If your answer to the second half of each question was a resounding “Yes,” congratulations! You have already grabbed that low-hanging sustainability fruit and are moving ever closer to net zero carbon emissions!
If your answer was less “Yes” than it could be, the good news is that there are opportunities on the table for you to make a big sustainability impact quickly.
Here’s a quick look at those opportunities with suggestions for how to take advantage of them:
- Reuse. When it’s time to procure equipment for a new project, review your current IT asset inventory first. You might be surprised to find valuable assets languishing in dark corners that could be repurposed in a meaningful way. The bigger the company, the more un- or underutilized equipment you’ll find. At MDSi we use our proprietary Acuity software to help companies with this particular task, and it’s not uncommon to find thousands of dollars in forgotten equipment that can be repurposed elsewhere. Redeploying those products will not only keep them out of landfills, it will result in thousands of dollars in savings.
- Look into OEM-certified remanufacturing or refurbishing programs. Cisco has one called Cisco Refresh. HP has one called HP Renew. When you buy product from them (or through an authorized partner like MDSi) you can be certain that the products will work like new and are warrantied like new. Better still from a sustainability perspective, refurbished equipment generally requires 85% less material, power, and water to produce. So if you still need to buy something after repurposing everything you can, check OEM-certified refurbished inventories for the rest. They’ll often be able to cover a big chunk of your BOM, which will reduce the amount of new equipment you need to buy.
- Reinvest the savings from points 1 and 2 above into energy-efficient new solutions. The budget you save through asset optimization can be redirected toward cutting-edge technologies that reduce environmental impact and drive innovation.
- Ask your disposition vendors hard questions about what they do with the products you send them to dispose of. How do they recycle? Where do the materials go? Can they prove that they are ISO certified? If their answers are unsatisfactory, find a vendor that is committed to zero landfill practices and can back up their claims with proof that they meet industry standards.
- Measure, measure, measure. While shrinking your carbon footprint is inherently a good thing, we live in a world where you also need to prove that you are doing the good thing. You need to know what percentage of your purchases were refurbished over the year, how many pounds of reusable raw materials you recycled, and how many pounds of carbon emissions you avoided through product repair and reuse.
If this still sounds a bit overwhelming and you’re unsure where to begin, reach out to MDSi. We’ve been helping companies responsibly dispose of IT equipment for more than 30 years, and we can take care of every process listed above, from asset tracking and refurbished product sourcing to recycling and reporting. In the last year alone, we helped our customers recycle 3.8 million pounds of reusable raw materials, reuse 98,628 assets, and avoid 26,092 tons of carbon emissions. We can help you too.