The technology we rely on every day has become one of the planet’s biggest sources of pollution. Data centers underpin the digital world across finance, enterprise, healthcare, education – even the apps on our smartphones. The flow of data everywhere, together with innovations such as AI and 5G, has resulted in an explosion of demand for data center capacity. While that massive growth has created tremendous economic and societal value, it has also played a significant role in the current climate crisis. It’s estimated that as much as 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are driven by the global information and communication industry. And that percentage is set to double in the next three years.

It can all be traced back to decades of take-make-waste behavior. As Aidin Aghamiri, CEO at ITRenew points out, “Historically every new data center that has been built and outfitted with new equipment has negatively contributed to the world’s carbon problem. Industry-generated CO2 emissions have risen by 400 million tons since 2013, while faster hardware refresh cycles are creating more than 50 million tonnes of e-waste annually.”

Clearly a different approach is required: circular economic models consider the entire lifecycle of physical assets, from the mining of materials and manufacturing of hardware, to the energy used to run it and end of life practices that ensure materials are repurposed, reused and recycled to minimize waste and close the loop. Ali Fenn, President at ITRenew says that the company is part of a radical shake-up that will make the whole industry more sustainable:

“ITRenew is fundamentally in the business of enabling a global circular economic model for the IT hardware industry. If we have materials already in use, let’s think about maximizing lifetime value and life cycles in the aggregate so that we can avoid the carbon production and sustainability impacts tied to new manufacturing. With digital transformation accelerating and demand for new infrastructure growing, this approach offers the added benefit of lowering the cost of solutions and getting them where they need to be in the global markets more quickly.”

To achieve this, ITRenew decommissions millions of servers annually in the world’s largest cloud data center environments. Fenn explains what happens next:

“We take that best-in-class equipment and transform it into solutions that meet the needs of the global enterprise and other cloud service provider markets and system builders, enabling them to deliver the best, most cost effective and most sustainable solutions in their businesses.”

Can the needs of the IT industry – which thrives on eve- expanding capacity and innovations in speed – really be met with recertified solutions? According to Erik Riedel, SVP Compute and Storage at ITRenew the answer is a clear ‘yes’:

“Hyperscale technologies are used in the most demanding data centers worldwide. We’re taking high-performance material from around the world, re-certifying it, and transforming it back into business-critical data center and edge computing technology. We’re able to provide higher density, higher performance, higher reliability solutions, and that benefits our customers and their customers beyond them.”

Riedel shows that by rethinking the design and the sourcing of infrastructure and infrastructure components, ITRenew is able to achieve both economic and environmental efficiencies for customers. In real terms, using re-certified equipment can save up to 50 percent of costs, plus ITRenew can slash delivery times from two or three months to two or three weeks.

While the business benefits are clear, Ali Fenn points out that the environment is the long-term winner:

“If 5 million servers can be re-certified and sold into secondary markets, that’s over 10 million metric tons of carbon that you can avoid – the same as pulling two million cars off the road annually, or needing to procure about 580 million of carbon offsets. This is systems level change we’re talking about, on a global scale, and the data center industry has an absolute obligation to take a leadership role.”

Circular economic principles allow businesses to reach zero carbon faster and in a more economically viable and equitable way. Fahmida Bangert, VP Sustainability at ITRenew says that key to achieving this goal goes beyond the company.

“Collaboration is critical. With the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, we’re working to codify the concept of circular economy and business principles into the way carbon accounting is understood and credited for. We’re working with Open Compute Project to look at design and remanufacturing criteria. We’re also working with Circular Electronic Partnerships to widen the lens of carbon accounting.”

Aidin Aghamiri says that ITRenew will redefine the way enterprises and service providers think about aligning their hardware to their real workloads and target outcomes.

“Global IT teams will shift from being supply chain burdens to being positive impact drivers on the path to net zero. ITRenew’s mission is to prove that financial success is not incompatible with having a positive impact on our environment and society.”