Environmental Case for Refurbished IT Equipment

One of our missions at TechSoup Global is to supply low-cost refurbished IT equipment to nonprofits and libraries. That in itself is good and useful, but a surprising additional aspect of this is that refurbished and remanufactured electronic devices provide the most environmentally friendly way to acquire and use computers, copiers and other IT equipment.

The scientific basis for the environmental kudos refurbished IT equipment receive is from Dr. Eric Williams of Arizona State University in his book, co-authored with Ruediger Kuehr, Computers and the Environment, Understanding and Managing Their Impacts.

In this 2003 book, the authors 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. Adding life to computers saves 5 to 20 times more energy than recycling throughout the computer's life cycle. It's much better for the environment to extend the life of a computer by 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% of PC energy consumption has already happened before a new computer is ever switched on. It is exhausted 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 1.1 billion computers now in worldwide use will be immense.

The green argument for electronics reuse goes beyond Williams and Kuehr, however. Paul Hawkin, in his 1999 book, Natural Capitalism, finds that the volume of material that goes into manufacturing a laptop is 4,000 to 1. When you discard a 5-pound laptop, you are also throwing away the 20,000 pounds of raw materials it took to make it.

The U.S. EPA 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 three to five years of age.

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 native to it pretty much runs as well as the day it was new. One important thing to know is that a four-year-old computer needs software that runs well on four-year-old equipment, and not the latest software versions. The bottom line is that most people do four or five things on computers: email, Internet browsing, accounting, multimedia (video and music), and office applications like word processing. Three- or four-year old equipment does all of that easily.

At TechSoup Global another of our missions is to ensure that the refurbished IT equipment that we offer undergoes state-of-the art refurbishment. Our Refurbished Computer Initiative (RCI) supplies warrantied refurbished laptop and desktop computers to nonprofits and public libraries. The computers come with Windows XP and Office 2003. The RCI program also offers free end-of-life takeback and recycling via our refurbishment partner, Redemtech, which is about as environmentally beneficial as it gets.

Information from this blog appeared previously on TechSoup’s website.