‘Re-manufacturing’ to lessen e-waste environmental drag

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Silverdale business Greenbox is 'remanufacturing' computers and devices, reducing e-waste destined for landfills

A national e-waste product stewardship scheme is in the works for next year, but one company is getting ahead of the new scheme and is busy hiring technicians to re-purpose IT hardware, believing “the best form of recycling is reuse”.

Trans-Tasman company Greenbox “re-manufactures” computers at sites in Australia and New Zealand under licence from the original makers such as Apple, HP and Dell, upgrading them to extend their lives with new parts like circuit boards, chips, and screens to extend their useful lives, sometimes even doubling them.

Greenbox’s customers are businesses and government departments, which pay it to manage their IT assets from sourcing and installing them to managing them at the end of the end of their useful lives.

But some just call it in to help them to deal with their end of life hardware.

And the speed at which phones and computers become outdated is set to accelerate, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence.

That technology will lead to an increase in e-waste that New Zealand has to deal with, mirroring a forecast global e-waste crisis that the United Nation’s Unitar agency says will rise from 62 million tonnes a year to 82m tonnes by 2030.

To put that into perspective, that’s the weight of just over 390,000 times that of the metal parts of the Statue of Liberty in the United States.

Ross Thompson, chief executive of Greenbox, has another way of envisioning the scale of the future e-waste volume.

Greenbox is expanding creating more roles for technicians to ‘re-manufacture’ IT hardware like laptops to increase their working lives, sometimes as much as doubling them.

“That’s the equivalent weight of the Great Wall of China,” he says.

Whatever analogy is reached for, it’s a very big number, and Thompson says New Zealand was not yet ready to deal with the accelerated cycle of technology obsolescence.

“The layman is unaware of the magnitude of volume that we're putting into landfill every every year,” he says.

E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream, he says.

From a global perspective, New Zealand and Australia have high e-waste footprints, and average of about 22 kg per person, per year, compared with a global average, including poorer countries, of about 7 kg every year.

It’s a process that reduces the need to make new ones, something that is extremely resource intensive.

E-waste is something New Zealand is beginning to take more seriously, but we still have a globally outsized per capita e-waste footprint.

Making a new phone generates 84kg of CO2-equivalent emissions, requires 83,000 litres of water, and 265kgs of raw materials, Thompson says.

“Refurbishing the same smartphone and giving it a second life reduces the CO2 impact by 92%, water required by 91% and the amount of raw materials required to refurbish the smartphone by 86% when compared against what is consumed through the production phase of a new unit,” he says.

Zero to landfill

Wayne Angus, Greenbox’s new country manager for New Zealand, says hardware that comes into the company’s facilities in Wellington, Christchurch and Auckland is sorted, graded, and decisions made about what happens to it next.

Many items are “re-manufactured” here in New Zealand, with other sent overseas for re-manufacturing. Some cannot be save, and go through a process that ends up with their parts being recycled.

The company is close to securing a “zero to landfill” certification for its operations.

Failed hardware that will not get remanufactured at Greenbox’s Silverdale site in Auckland.

The re-manufactured devices find new homes through a number of different routes. Some are resold through the likes of PB Tech and other tech retailers.

Some are donated to lower-income families through the Te Kura correspondence school.

Others are exported for sale overseas.

And a growing number go back into government departments and businesses.

Angus says Greenbox would like to see the country follow the likes of The Netherlands, which mandates that government IT tenders include 20% re-manufactured hardware.

Technicians at work for Greenbox in Auckland.

That’d save money, as well as reducing the IT drag on the planet’s finite resources, he says.

New Zealand is behind other developed nations in action to move towards a more circular, less wasteful economy, Thompson said.

Officially, e-waste was recognised in 2020 as one of six priority product classes for the development of product stewardship schemes.

These are schemes that effectively embed the price of responsible disposal and recycling in the price of a product in order to run a national system to ensure it happens.

The national e-waste product stewardship scheme is still under development, but could be in operation next year.

But, Thompson says: “The best form of recycling is reuse.”

That’s getting a boost as European authorities have taken action to force manufacturers to design their devices to be more easily repaired and re-manufactured, including Apple, which has been notorious for making devices that are glued, not screwed together.

The organisations that contract with Greenbox are not only interested in environmentally defensible disposal of the devices they no longer need.

Greenbox “triple” wipes devices te remove the slightest chance of data falling into the wrong hands.

They are also often wary of what happens to devices to ensure no data is compromised after hardware exits their organisations.

Data losses are widely understood to be the result of hacking, or theft by employees, but Thompson says: “20% of all data incursions actually happen when the assets being disposed of.”