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| Feature Story: IT Asset Recovery's Tipping Point and What It Means for You |
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The GAO blasts the U.S. EPA’s enforcement of regulations prohibiting export of CRT monitors. This report attracted significant media attention and has set the stage for more stringent regulations.
Download GAO report ›
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BusinessWeek investigated Supreme Asset Management & Recovery and found ample evidence that current regulations – and Supreme’s own environmental policy – were being flagrantly violated.
Read BusinessWeek article ›
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A 60 Minutes segment followed providing a glimpse into just how bad conditions are where our e-waste is being dumped. If you are responsible for IT asset disposition, you owe it to yourself to view this report.
Watch 60 Minutes video ›
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BAN, which asked recyclers to sign a “pledge” not to landfill or export e-waste, has concluded that too many recyclers can not be trusted to honor the pledge and just announced a new e-Stewards Initiative.
Watch BAN video ›
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When the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report criticizing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for lax enforcement of regulations prohibiting the export of CRT monitors, it put the recycling industry on notice and raised
awareness of the risks that companies like yours take when disposing of IT assets.
Even if you work with a recycler that claims not to export or landfill, there is still a good chance that your assets are contributing to the devastating environmental and human health problems being caused by improper management of e-waste. That's because too many recyclers are saying one thing
and doing another.
The GAO report revealed the scope of the problem when it found 43 recyclers violating regulations prohibiting export of CRT monitors. Many of these companies make claims of environmental responsibility on their Web sites and provide their customers with "certificates
of destruction" that are supposed to prove responsible recycling, and yet they are actively flaunting the minimal regulations that currently exist.
As much as 80% of e-waste that is collected for recycling is shipped overseas for dismantling under horrific conditions, poisoning the people, land, air, and water in China, other Asian nations, and possibly Mexico as well. – The Electronics TakeBack Coalition
BusinessWeek and 60 Minutes both did investigative stories exposing this hypocrisy. (Read Jim Puckett's first-hand account of traveling
to China with the 60 Minutes crew in this issue's Guest Column) These stories not only called out specific
recyclers, they named customers of those recyclers, with 60 Minutes showing close-ups of asset tags identifying the source of computers being pulled out of piles of e-waste in Guiyu, China.
Considering this, it's no surprise that the Basel Action Network (BAN), an advocacy group that has played
a key role in calling attention to this crisis, plans to replace its "Electronic Recycler's Pledge of True Stewardship" with an e-Steward's Initiative that
will include field audits designed to confirm that a recycler's business processes match the e-Steward policies. BAN also released a new video showing the harmful effects of e-waste, and highlighting the names of more companies whose assets
have ended up contributing to the e-waste problem.
| Taking Steps to Protect Your Business |
Clearly you can not simply accept a recycler's certificate of destruction as proof that your assets won't end up in front of the 60 Minutes cameras. You need documentation that shows the final disposition of your materials traceable back to the serial numbers of your equipment. In addition,
Redemtech recommends that companies adopt "mass balance accounting and reconciliation," which involves recording the weight of the materials sent to a recycler and reconciling this weight against the reports received from your recycler. (For
more on mass balance accounting, read Bob Houghton's post in (re)blog.) Without these safeguards, you simply can't be confident that your equipment is being handled in the way you think it is.
But that is the bare minimum you should expect from your recycling partner. More and more organizations
are discovering that simply protecting against negative outcomes is a very shallow approach to green IT that leaves significant financial and environmental benefits on the table.
| The Road to Sustainability |
Sustainable Computing is an approach to IT asset management that encompasses lifecycle management and utilization, as well as disposition. This allows the highest standards of environmental and social responsibility to be implemented without additional cost. In fact, it often has a positive effect on IT costs.
For example, one approach to reducing energy consumption is to buy new, more efficient equipment. However, when the energy savings achieved with new equipment are balanced against the cost of early obsolescence, new equipment often has a negative environmental impact.
That's because the PC manufacturing process is surprisingly resource and energy intensive. Manufacturing a PC consumes almost as much raw material as a midsize automobile and, according to UN University, uses 81 percent of the energy a PC consumes throughout its life. Shortening lifecycles by introducing more energy efficient desktops
can actually increase your environmental impact. A better solution would be to implement programs to extend lifecycles, creating a positive environmental impact while also reducing IT procurement costs.
Redemtech has introduced several resources to help you develop more sustainable approaches to IT asset management, including a new white paper from the experts in asset management at IDC and an expanded section of our Web site.
The white paper, Beyond Power: IT's Roadmap to Sustainable Computing, authored by IDC Research Manager David Daoud, moves the green IT discussion beyond data center energy efficiency to include the procurement, management and disposition of IT assets across your organization. It creates a vision for IT asset management practices that proactively reduce environmental impact while lowering total cost of ownership—and outlines a roadmap to help you make that vision a reality.
You can download this white paper from the new Sustainable Computing section of the Redemtech web site, which consolidates a variety of resources focused on Sustainable Computing, including links to recent news articles, the GAO report that has triggered so much of the recent attention, an environmental regulations data base and descriptions of Redemtech services designed to help you achieve sustainability.
New web site aggregates information that helps IT managers
tackle the Green IT challenge ›
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