by Angela Miller
Today I finalized our official Technology/E-Waste Recycling Policy at NCTD.  I am happy about this policy for a couple of reasons.  While we have traditionally attempted to sell our surplus or retired equipment, it usually is at a loss.  The way we are required to do this is that we pay an auction company to come retrieve the equipment and sell it for us with a revenue-sharing approach.  While this would be excellent if we had items of value, most of the equipment I intend to retire really has no useful life in it.  We are going to be retiring switches and routers that are more than 10 years old, desktop computers that are 7 years old… in other words, we usually end up owing money in the auction process.

So I was happy to be able to garner agreement from the executive team for a Technology Recycling Policy.  We have put three local companies through an evaluation process to determine which offers the best combination of price, safety, security, and obviously the greenest recycling program.  Happily the managers agreed that using a company which would recycle our materials at no cost to us was not only a smarter fiscal approach, it is a more environmentally-friendly approach.

Having a formal corporate recycling policy is a wise decision no matter the size of your firm.  It is important in this process to develop a solid set of criteria for determining when equipment has reached the end of its useful life, when you might be able to trade-in for credits with your equipment manufacturer, and when it is most appropriate to recycle.  Our policy includes not only these decision criteria, but also metrics for measuring our disposal of e-waste, and a scorecard for ensuring that our vendors meet our sustainability goals.

This scorecard is an important approach because we are not interested in inappropriate disposal.  Unfortunately many companies that recycle do so by simply shipping our e-waste overseas where is poses significant problems to the third-world countries that accept it.  Instead, NCTD wants to insure that the components are broken down locally and all viable materials are separated and recycled here in the United States.  My message to other IT Managers and CIOs is to do your homework on this issue to ensure your policy is indeed a sustainable one.

Dig deeper on the issues:

I relied on the following sites for analysis in support of this post:

Natural Resources Defense Council
TechNews Article
Geeks.com Article
PBS Frontline Article on Poor E-Waste Policy