What is an electronics recycler to do if its target customer base typically hasn’t allocated any funds to pay for the service provided? The answer is straightforward: educate your customers so they make informed decisions.
When thinking about the challenge of recycling e-waste in an economically sustainable manner, it’s helpful to understand the drivers of value and cost in a typical pile of end-of-life hardware. These are the key educational points we make sure to drive home.
- It may be end of life for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s its end of life. Secondhand shops are as old as retail. Why? Because one person’s trash has always been another person’s treasure. The same is true for electronics. You may be done with your smartphone because you need something fancier, faster and sexier. The guy down the street or on the other side of the world? Maybe his grandma just needs to send some emails and that three-year-old phone is perfect. Lesson: The best way to improve the economics of e-waste recycling is to reuse as much as possible. Don’t put unnecessary restrictions on your recycler, such as any electronics older than two years must be disassembled and recycled.
- Electronics do not age like wine. Revolution encourages our customers to dispose of their assets quickly once the decision has been made to retire them. The longer it sits in your server room, desk drawer or closet, the less it’s worth and the more likely that you will have to pay for it to be recycled. Lesson: Don’t delay. Recycle today.
- Certifications matter. There’s a right and wrong way to go about getting your electronics recycled. The wrong way is to go with whoever comes up first on Google. To be clear, the first ranked search may be the right choice, but you owe it to yourself and the environment to ask some questions. Why? Because not all electronics recyclers are created equal. Globally recognized e-waste recycling standards such as R2 are a signal that the company you are dealing with has been audited to ensure strict compliance with data and environmental protocols. If it doesn’t hold this certification, you don’t know what’s happening to your electronics. In addition, holders of the right certifications are often able to access subsidies and incentives to ensure proper recycling of your assets. This is where the economic part of the conversation comes into play. Lesson: Proper recycling costs money. Using a certified recycler often means you’re not bearing the full cost of proper data and environmental handling since your local government or regional government will often indirectly subsidize a portion of it.
- Data breaches are expensive. Don’t be cheap. Recent data breach victims from the corporate sector include Winners, Home Depot, Yahoo and Equifax. How silly would you feel if it happened to you because you went with the cheapest data disposition service provider? Would the few dollars per hard drive you saved at the time be worth it? In the context of reusing assets, data handling becomes even more critical. It can be done safely, but only if your chosen vendor knows what they are doing. Lesson: Assets can be reused safely, maximizing value for your company, but only if your data is secured by a reputable vendor.
If you choose your IT recycling partner wisely, they will minimize your costs in balance with maximizing your level of compliance and security. That is the balance every IT manager should be seeking to strike.
Read the full story at https://www.sustainablebrands.com/news_and_views/behavior_change/clayton_miller/how_one_e-waste_recycler_uses_education_incentivize_ri.