Almost every company has a closet full of forgotten electronics. It’s where you’ve put broken laptops, unused or nonworking cables, and old pagers or cellphones. While the electronics are out of the way, they’re still part of your carbon footprint. If you’re not including them in your corporate carbon reporting, you’re not fully doing your part.
Scope 1 (direct emissions) and Scope 2 (purchased electricity, heating, and cooling) emissions are the easiest to see and measure. You know how much natural gas your building used and how much electricity it consumed. It’s not enough. There’s also Scope 3, which covers the carbon footprint of your electronics’ end of life.
The Lifecycle of Electronics
Consider the full lifecycle of electronics when reporting your corporate carbon footprint.
- Extraction and Manufacturing – The carbon emissions generated when extracting materials to make electronics and when manufacturing them.
- Transportation – The emissions generated when transporting goods by boat, rail, plane, or truck.
- Product Use – The emissions generated from the moment a device powers on and is used by employees or customers each day.
- End-of-Life – The emissions generated when a product reaches its end of life and must be shipped to a facility for recycling or refurbishing. This includes emissions from the recycling process and from shipping the recycled materials to a processor for preparation for new manufacturing processes.
Those emissions count towards your carbon footprint. Ideally, you want your emissions to be below the limits set by international climate agreements. If they’re not, you have a carbon debt.
What Is Carbon Debt?
Before you can understand carbon debt, you need to know what the international climate agreements are. There are four important ones.
Kyoto Protocol – The treaty was established in 1997 and enforced beginning in 2005. The Kyoto Protocol requires countries to reduce emissions in many areas, including land use and forestry. Currently, there are 192 parties, including Canada and the EU.
Montreal Protocol – Established in 1987, the treaty focuses on ozone-depleting substances to lower carbon footprints.
Paris Agreement – This treaty went into effect in 2015/2016 and requires all nations to reduce emissions. The goal is to reach net-zero emissions and limit global warming to no more than 34.7°F to 35.6°F. (1.5ºC to 2ºC)
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – This treaty’s goal is to ease the human impact on greenhouse gases. It’s meant to ensure that ecosystems survive and food security is protected.
Carbon debt is the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that exceed those limits. Often, your carbon footprint isn’t as low as you might imagine. Business owners often overlook indirect emissions, mainly because they occur before they take possession of electronic devices.
A large percentage of a device’s carbon footprint occurs before you even power on your device for the first time. ITAD and e-waste recycling steps add to the overall carbon footprint. An estimated 85% of a desktop’s carbon footprint occurs during manufacturing and shipping. All of this impacts the environment.
Corporate carbon reporting is the process of measuring, documenting, and reporting your organization’s greenhouse gas emissions. Six categories are measured in accordance with ISO 14064-1:2018.
- Direct Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Removals – Source emissions owned or controlled by the company.
- Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Imported Energy – Emissions from electricity and heat consumed by the company.
- Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Transportation – Emissions coming from shipping, employee commutes, and manufacturing.
- Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Products Used – Emissions from goods and services your company purchases.
- Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions Associated With Products Used – Emissions created when products sold are used.
- Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Other Sources – Indirect emissions from other sources, such as ITAD and recycling processes or leased item returns.
Corporate carbon reporting considers your entire carbon debt.
Why That Matters
Why does carbon debt matter? While some states have laws banning electronics from landfills, about half the country lacks specific laws. Instead, people should follow national hazardous waste laws. Even so, the EPA found that 1.64 million tons of small appliances ended up in landfills. Only 120,000 tons were properly recycled.
For electronics specifically, 1.04 million tons were properly recycled, but 2.7 million tons were generated. There are no reports on how much of that ended up in landfills. It’s easy to imagine that a lot ended up in the wrong place.
When an unwanted or broken laptop, computer, or smartphone is sent to a landfill instead of an electronics recycling facility, the contents of batteries, deteriorating metals, and plastic slowly break down over the years, eventually ending up in the landfill’s soil.
Today’s landfills have plastic liners, monitors, and filtration systems that prevent contamination of soil and groundwater, but these geomembrane liners are still in their infancy. We’ve come a long way since clay liners, but it’s tricky.
HDPE liners have been used since the 1980s. The estimated lifespans of geomembranes are difficult to pin down because they depend on soil and air temperatures. Predictions suggest they should last 400 years or more, but no one knows for sure. If there’s a leak, the risk of hazardous materials entering the soil and water is concerning.
Recycling is essential for that reason. Instead of items sitting for centuries in landfills, they’re broken down by experts in e-waste. The materials are sorted, processed, and reused to make new electronics. It creates a circular economy where items are purchased, consumed, properly recycled or refurbished, and reused.
Not only does it reduce demand for newly mined raw materials, which have a heavy environmental impact, but it also provides low-cost refurbished products for people who couldn’t otherwise afford new items.
How IT Asset Disposition Solves Your Problems
There’s another concern with electronics that sit untouched in cabinets or storerooms. The data on those devices is accessible to anyone. When you are a bank, a medical center, a retailer’s headquarters, or a car dealer, you possess a great deal of private customer/client information.
Data theft is a crime, and it’s your responsibility to protect that data at all costs. HIPAA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and other privacy laws require you to destroy data on unused electronics. If you haven’t ensured that data is wiped, with proof of the process used, you’re at risk of fines, lawsuits, and a damaged reputation.
Instead of letting electronics sit untouched for years, call ERI to arrange ITAD services at your company or at one of ERI’s secure facilities. You ensure electronics are recycled in accordance with R2 and e-Stewards protocols. You recapture some value from electronics that can be refurbished. Best of all, you have proof that you took the appropriate steps to lower your carbon footprint.