Monday 30 April 2012

Green IT believes in Material Recycling !

The topic of IT material recycling is an important issue to consider when thinking "Green". Recycling IT material can have  positive outcomes such as:


1. If we try to recycle used material (even simple hardware such as peripheral material for instance), use of energy and emissions can be reduced because of lower manufacturing costs.
2. Recycling material can be cost saving: Recycled material will always be cheaper for the user than new material. There are programs such as "we buy laptops" by Apple in the UK that buy second-hand laptops for recycling purposes :  they will offer cash in exchange for your used laptop/IT material. We suggest you take a look !    
http://www.webuy-laptops.co.uk/
3. When IT hardware is taken to a waste, a lot of this material can contain toxic products that can pollute the earth (such as the ink contained in printers or batteries). Therefore by recycling, this pollution can be reduced considerably.
4. Developing and third-world countries can benefit from Recycling programs: There are programs and charities that specialize in sending used IT material to unfavored parts of the world such as the African continent, Latin-America or Asia. Did you know that for instance close to 80% of the recycled material coming from the west coast silicon valley goes to China and Pakistan?(1)


The CMC (Computers For Charity) program for instance, that has been up and running since 1994, has managed to send more than a quarter million computer systems to more than one hundred countries world-wide. Can you imagine how this can impact education in poor countries? 
http://www.computersforcharities.co.uk/home (2)


References: 
(1) Wikipedia
(2) CMC website


More info on material recycling to come.... please stay tuned !