IT Asset Disposal’s Role on the Corporate Social and Environmental Sustainability Agenda
 What does it mean to take a “green” approach to IT management? So far, it’s mostly meant reducing the energy consumption of power-hungry systems in large data centers.
But what if these steps your company is taking to reduce its environmental impact were actually having the opposite affect?
And is it possible, with all the focus on Green IT in the last two years, that the single most important thing your company can do to reduce the carbon footprint of its technology systems has been largely ignored?
Get Beyond Power: IT’s Roadmap to Sustainable Computing, a groundbreaking new white paper from International Data Corporation (IDC). You’ll find it’s not only possible, it’s happened.
Moving Beyond Power
While IT manufacturers rushed to market more energy-efficient technologies, no one was talking about the impact of technology change on the environment—or your bottom line.
But truth be told, the most powerful change you can make to reduce the environmental impact of technology just may be to not replace the equipment you have.
According to IDC’s Beyond Power, reducing energy consumption is not only a limited approach to green IT, making decisions strictly on equipment energy consumption can actually increase both environmental impact and IT costs.
The Road to Sustainability
Green IT practices for environmentally Sustainable Computing must extend beyond power consumption to address other critical factors within IT management that impact your carbon footprint, including equipment lifecycles, inventory management and asset disposition.
Beyond Power will help you create a more comprehensive approach to reducing the environmental impact of IT equipment by outlining strategies for extending equipment lifecycles, refurbishing and upgrading surplus technology and managing zero-impact disposition. It explores the management challenges associated with increasing IT sustainability and reviews the best practices that have emerged.
Here are just some of the issues covered in this IDC white paper, sponsored by Redemtech:
- The financial and environmental impact of equipment lifecycles
- How technology reuse affects sustainability, social welfare and the bottom line
- Strategies for maximizing the value of idle equipment
- Keeping IT equipment out of the waste stream at end of life
If you’ve been charged with developing programs to reduce the environmental footprint—or increase the efficiency—of your IT organization, this is the resource you’ve been looking for.
Get more information on Sustainable Computing practices ›
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About the Author
Excerpted from Beyond Power: IT’s Roadmap to Sustainable Computing:
“A few years now into the Green IT debate, the reality is that no single company has yet achieved a strategy that could be identified as a ‘best practice.’”
“Even companies with mature asset management practices tend to take only a limited and fragmented approach to managing for sustainability. This is unfortunate, as the data is becoming available to rationalize comprehensive best practices for reducing the impact of IT on the environment, while simultaneously improving the financial productivity of the hardware/software portfolio.”
“Of all the components of the IT lifecycle, hardware asset retirement has the most significant impact on the environment. The physical handling and final disposition of decommissioned hardware can be the determining factor in whether an organization controls its environmental impact and risk or contributes to greater socioeconomic decline.”
“Although it may seem daunting, the task of greening a company's IT infrastructure lifecycle, and in particular its asset disposition practices, should be simple to implement while the rewards and payoffs can be positive.”
David Daoud, author of Beyond Power: IT’s Roadmap to Sustainable Computing, is Research Manager with IDC's U.S. Quarterly PC Tracker and Personal Computing Systems, responsible for analyzing and forecasting the PC market. In addition, David is involved in green IT research and how the environment is reshaping IT lifecycle and asset disposal management.
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