Will the value of old IT soon lie in carbon offset credits?
The value in old IT will soon lie more in carbon offset credits than the physical valuation of the kit.
That's the view of Mat Jordan, an executive at global lifecycle services firm Procurri, which hopes to take the channel by storm with a new carbon offset calculator tool.
The tool will help end-user organisations "monetise" the value of carbon in their old IT assets in the event they are reused rather than disposed of, according to Jordan.
It was launched in January as part of a wider repositioning at Procurri, which provides ITAD, second-user hardware and third-party maintenance services via the channel. It claims to work with over 1,000 UK resellers and SIs, including Computacenter, Softcat, CDW and SCC.
Procurri has updated its strapline from ‘changing how the world buys technology' to ‘leading the channel green'.
It has also received a five-star rating from Support the Goals, and has begun working towards becoming carbon-neutral in partnership with ‘Carbon Footprint'.
But talking to CRN, Jordan said the aim is for Procurri to also "provide building blocks to help society change".
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"We've been honing the tool in for 12 months," explained Jordan, who is global head of lifecycle services, hardware and distribution for Procurri.
"It started when one of our large customers asked us what value we can bring over and above security and green [credentials]. They wanted to know ‘what do we get out of this deal'?
Based on figures from US university MIT, Procurri's calculator assumes that a 1.5kg laptop has a carbon footprint of 300kg of Co2. It then uses pro-rata calculations for larger items such as servers to arrive at the total amount of carbon an organisation will save should their end-of-life kit be reused rather than disposed of.
One of Procurri's clients has already used the tool to show they have saved eight million kgs of Co2, a figure they can now present to the market as part of their ESG reporting, Jordan (pictured) said.
With the US "the last domino to topple" when it comes to global action on climate change, organisations will pay increasing attention to the carbon value of their old IT assets, Jordan predicted.
"Is carbon the new value in your IT? It's all going that way. The value will be more around carbon offset credits than the actual physical value the product gives you," he said.
"If we start to rationalise the production costs of these [white goods] when it comes to Co2, then we start to make informed choices, and we are very good at that as a species because everyone wants to genuinely do the right thing," Jordan added.
"I'm hoping we can put Procurri in the middle of being able to articulate that message and drive that message into the corporates so they are able to quantify, understand and - most importantly - commercialise it."