A Circular Argument on the Way to Being Resolved – Digitalisation World

Earth Overshoot Day – the day when our demand for ecological resources exceeds the planet’s resources – is due to be on the 29th of July this year, with developed countries likely to be even earlier. This means that we are using over twice as many resources than Earth can produce. In this article, Rich Kenny, Group IT Director at Techbuyer discusses why the reuse of materials and investing in the circular economy is the way forward, and how Techbuyer is helping.

This article was first published in Digitalisation World. Read the full version here.

Article summary:

  • Around 121 million servers are due to be deployed between 2019 and 2023. Each one of these contains a high proportion of steel, aluminium and plastic, three of the top five materials for industrial greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, as well as materials that are in low or politically unstable supply. When a server is disposed of, all these materials go to waste.
  • Solid data on the material usages involved in data centre equipment is difficult to find. The CEDaCI project, which Techbuyer is an associate partner of, is building an understanding of the entire data centre supply chain in order to answer questions we’ve been asking for a long time. This will extend the product life of data centre equipment and aid the secondary market.
  • The impact of energy efficiency is significant. By 2025, the impact of the digital sector is expected to rise to 5.5% and possibly 8% in the worst-case scenario. This means we must do everything we can to optimise efficiency at use phase, as well as reducing manufacturing emissions and materials usage.
  • Techbuyer’s KTP proved that a previous generation of server was able to outperform the latest generation. This goes to show that the right approach to systems can yield great results when it comes to efficiency, compute power and the bottom line.

Techbuyer is a global leader in the buying, selling and refurbishing of storage, server and networking equipment. Refurbishing data centre hardware ensures that more equipment is reused, reduces e-waste and also provides IT solutions which perform as good as new. Find out more about our refurbished servers here.