Sustainable IT: End-of-life considerations

While most of the conversation at ARN’s Sustainable IT roundtable focused on energy efficiency, a critical issue that can’t be forgotten is asset disposal. E-waste is a massive problem around the world and one that’s not easy to contain, Symantec’s Jose Iglesias said.

“In the US and UK, there is legislation on how you dispose of those toxic assets. When we did a tender for our printers, and we actually paid more for the printers because we went with an organisation that would dispose of the cartridges responsibly,” he said.

But Fujitsu’s Alison O’Flynn pointed out there is no legislation in Australia for the disposal of IT assets. She highlighted the Victorian Government’s ByteBack program as one industry-led initiative to tackle the issue but said more needed to be done.

“Seventy-eight per cent [of e-waste goes] to landfill. There is a proposal up with Government looking at how we dispose of those properly and how we look at that as an industry, particularly around pricing and where you put that price point – is it at the manufacturing level, or with the customer,” she said.

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