The Environmental Case for Remanufactured IT

The Environmental Case for Remanufactured IT

By Jim Lynch

This article was originally published on TechSoup.org. It is a little-known fact that remanufactured electronic devices provide the most environmentally friendly way to acquire and use computers and other IT equipment. Among the famous three R's of conservationism - reduce, reuse, recycle, the neglected middle child, reuse, doesn't seem to get nearly enough credit. Here is why reusing electronic devices is the best option.

The Basis for the Environmental Benefits of Refurbished IT

The scientific basis for the environmental case for refurbished IT equipment is primarily from Dr. Eric Williams of Rochester Institute of Technology in his book, co-authored with Ruediger Kuehr, Computers and the Environment, Understanding and Managing Their Impacts.

In it, they find that the environmental cost to produce a computer and monitor is immense, especially for microprocessors. Producing the average 53-pound desktop computer and CRT monitor requires 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 50 pounds of chemicals, and 3,330 pounds of water.

According to Williams and Kuehr, adding additional life to computers saves 5 to 20 times more energy than recycling over the computer's life cycle. It's much better for the environment to extend the life of a computer for an extra two or three years than to buy a new one every three to four years.

The thing I found perhaps most interesting in the Williams and Kuehr findings is that 75 percent of PC energy consumption has already happened before a new computer is ever switched on. It is used up in the production phase. If this equipment has a six or seven-year lifespan rather than three or four years, the environmental impact for even a fraction of the billions computers and mobile devices now in use in the world will be immense. Here is how immense:

· Computer hardware sales is steady at around 250 million units each year with $400 billion in sales annually.

· The number of mobile devices (phones and tablets) in use in the world now well exceeds the population of 7.4 billion. We attained that strange accomplishment back in 2014.

Half the Periodic Table is in That PC or Mobile Phone

The green argument for electronics reuse goes beyond Williams and Kuehr, however. Paul Hawkin, in his book, Natural Capitalism, finds that the volume of material that goes into manufacturing a laptop is 4,000 to 1. When you discard a five-pound laptop you are also throwing away the 20,000 pounds of raw materials it took to make it.

The hundreds of raw materials that are needed to make electronics devices have an incredibly long and complex supply chain. I'm told that circuit boards are among the good with the longest supply chain of any manufactured item. The materials for them must come from mines and factories from all over the world. The University of Illinois Sustainable Electronics Initiative estimates that each PC or mobile phone contains about half the periodic table.

How Much Does Reuse Save?

The EPA's Electronics Environmental Benefits Calculator shows environmental savings for computer recycling and reuse in terms of energy, materials, CO₂, toxic emissions, and more. It finds that it is roughly 25 times more beneficial environmentally to reuse computers than to recycle them at 3 to 5 years of age because remanufacturing significantly reduces total energy consumption of these very resource intensive devices. It also conserves materials.

By retaining the intended purpose of each complex manufactured device, remanufacturing retains all the materials contained in IT equipment. Just the metals include aluminum, antimony, arsenic, barium, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, gallium, gold, iron, lead, manganese, mercury, palladium, platinum, selenium, silver and zinc. Some amount of material is lost in the end of life recycling process, so retaining valuable and often toxic materials as long as possible is another reason why reuse is so important for conservation.

How Does Refurbished Equipment Perform Compared to New?

The environmental case for electronics reuse aside, one question that always crops up is how refurbished IT equipment compares with new equipment in terms of performance. Most of us have been frustrated by using a three or four-year-old computer that takes forever to start up and do simple things like open a web page or send an email message. The main reason for this is that over time, software degrades or corrupts, developing interoperability conflicts and many other glitches.

A machine that is repaired, cleaned out, and has fresh software installed that is appropriate to it pretty much runs as well as the day it was new. Our Top 6 Myths About Refurbished Hardware actually compares buying new vs remanufactured. I like the quote in that piece by Sarah Kim of E-Reuse Services, "We think of refurbished equipment as well-tested equipment. Most failures happen within the first six months of a computer's life."