DATA CENTER DECOMMISSIONING SERVICES

Anyone that works in the IT sector, especially those working in hyperscale data centers, will tell you that disposing of hundreds if not thousands of servers as they reach the end of their lifecycle can raise a few ethical dilemmas.

It’s perhaps not commonly known to all, but servers, storage arrays and networking equipment are utterly stuffed with components that are deadly to human life. In fact, many of the chemicals and materials used in most IT equipment is deadly to all forms of life. Before you run out of the building, I need to caveat that statement with the following declaration:

“It’s only really deadly if you start eating your IT hardware”

At this point you might be rolling your eyes and thinking “well I like chips, but not computer chips so I’m safe thank you”. Obviously, you are not about to start eating your keyboard but it turns out we are far from safe. Many States have aligned with the EPA reports and banned IT hardware from landfill sites in an attempt to prevent “computer pollution”. It transpires that dumping our data center hardware ends up polluting our water tables and land. I don’t want to bum-you-out with stories of death, gloom and doom but it gets worse. It’s emerged that some nefarious computer recyclers were being paid to dispose of data center hardware and instead of paying to recycle it properly, they dumped it in developing countries. Thankfully, the EPA has classified computer ewaste as toxic hazardous material, which cannot be dumped outside of the USA. This is great news for the data center manager who wants to recycle responsibly!

“Recycling decommissioned data center IT hardware isn’t all rainbows and unicorns”

There’s no question that recycling data center equipment for its metals and materials is massively cleaner than mining and refining. Recycling servers, data storage and network equipment results in less environmental damage, less CO2 emissions, in fact less pollution in general. However, it’s still a dirty business and uses processes that aren’t always clean and sparkly. In fact, one of the best ways to recycle servers, is to have them refurbished and sold for reuse.

“Selling decommissioned servers can just mean passing the problem downstream”

Before you rush to sell your decommissioned data center IT hardware, let me stop you quickly. Selling used data center IT hardware that’s reached the end of its operational lifecycle can just be dumping the problem of disposal onto someone else. To prevent this problem our ITAD company has created a clean data center hardware decommissioning and disposal solution called ITAD ECO Plus. To learn more about this service CLICK HERE.