WP#53 - Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE): An IT Recycling Metric for Enterprises and Data Centers

Overview

This document is The Green Grid's white paper number 53, dated 5 March 2013. Its editor is Eric Brown. The paper defines Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE), which is The Green Grid's first universal metric for the responsible management of outdated equipment. The Green Grid is an industry consortium working on data centre energy and resource efficiency; this paper sits in its library and concerns the end-of-life management of equipment rather than energy.

EDE is intended for ICT end users and is designed to be simple. Its function is to let organisations measure progress in their equipment disposal processes over time. This turns the degree to which retired servers and network equipment go to reuse or recycling from a one-off report into an indicator that can be followed regularly. Its simplicity is intended to let organisations of different sizes adopt the metric easily.

Access to the paper requires a registration form, and only the publication date, editor and abstract from The Green Grid library page were used here; the full text was not read. The metric's calculation formula and limits are therefore not given here. Readers should consult the original document for the details. In that frame, EDE is an indicator that can be added to sustainability reporting.

Key points

1. The paper is dated 5 March 2013; the editor is Eric Brown.
2. EDE is The Green Grid's first universal metric for responsible management of outdated equipment.
3. It is intended for ICT end users.
4. It is designed to measure progress in equipment disposal processes over time.
5. It is meant to be a simple metric; calculation details are not given here.

Using it in design

• In operations and sustainability, add an EDE field to the IT refresh plan: the share of retired equipment going to responsible reuse or recycling.
• Track the EDE value over the years to show progress in disposal processes.
• Present this share in the refresh plan report alongside equipment retirement decisions.

Who should read it

Operations and sustainability managers who run IT refresh and disposal processes.

Publication details

Authors

Eric Brown; Marc Banks; Gideon Schroeder; Ezra Benjamin; Harkeeret Singh; Thomas Calderwood; Steven Stawarz; Ricardo Gonzalez Llera; Mike Watson; John Pflueger

Publisher

The Green Grid

Year

2013

Document number

WP 53

Document language

English

Source type

Industry body

Access

Citation only

Licence

Copyright retained; citation only — the publisher’s terms apply to the original document

Citation