Asset management & E-waste

Harner to BigCommerce, Lenior to Samsiung

Greening your business has short-term effects that will save you money, let employees breathe better, and maybe even help land you a few more customers. These tips, sites, and kits can help your business go green for 2012.

Electronic waste is a global time bomb and regulations must be tightened to prevent toxic contamination from mobile phones, computers and other electronic goods, experts say.

With the onset of the new financial year and next-generation IT infrastructure being potentially deployed, Kroll Ontrack has issued a call for Australian consumers and enterprises to plan for how they retire old computers or systems.

The Computer Sciences Corporation’s (CSC) latest report assessing and measuring the energy implications of applied IT has downplayed the industry’s focus on energy efficiency and highlighted the growing problem of electronic waste (e-waste).

What happens to a notebook once it goes out of service?

Green has never been sexier. It's the new black, and it sells.

Efforts to develop a national e-waste management scheme continue to stir up debate within the industry about where responsibility lies.

Some channel players have already adopted green business practices and are now driving them into their customer environments.

Spurred by business needs as well as environmental concerns, green IT projects blossomed in datacenters and on desktops throughout the world in 2007.

With most Americans switching their mobile handsets once every 18 months, the need to find safe ways to dispose of old mobile phones has only grown. ReCellular, a self-described "electronics-sustainability" firm based in the US, has spent the past two decades working with the US-based Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) to become a major recycler and reseller of mobile handsets and accessories. Every day, ReCellular processes thousands of unwanted handsets and either fixes them for resale or sends them off to be melted down and recycled. ReCellular Vice President Mike Newman spoke with Brad Reed about how his company is helping to reduce e-waste, as well as how enterprises can benefit from donating their mobile devices for reuse and recycling.

Tell us about the AIIA’s Byteback program.

In April, the Federal Minister for Finance and Deregulation, Lindsay Tanner, announced the appointment of UK efficiency expert, Sir Peter Gershon, to lead an independent review of the Australian Government's use and management of ICT. The terms of reference of the review are far reaching and of critical importance to our local industry. However given that it is an initiative of the Minister of Finance, its major thrust is cost-effective investment with an emphasis on consolidation.

The prospect of disposing of old IT equipment -- PCs, servers, storage gear, and the like -- may very well fill your heart with dread. After all, you're putting a lot of faith in a third party that the machines will be thoroughly wiped of confidential information, resold for a fair price, and, when applicable, properly disassembled, recycled, and disposed of. If your partners' practices end up being sloppy -- or downright criminal -- you could find yourself in regulatory and PR hell as confidential data protected by HIPAA or SarBox ends up in the wrong hands or 500 of your PCs end up in a landfill or river somewhere.

Doing the right thing makes sense from a business point of view as well as from an environmental and corporate social responsibility perspective.