Techbuyer
Medium sized company with almost 200 employees over seven offices worldwide, specialising in buying, refurbishing and re-selling of enterprise IT equipment.
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Focus: Supply chain decarbonisation
The economic crisis of 2008 resulted in a huge upswing in demand for refurbished enterprise IT equipment and so the company began to specialise in refurbishment at that point. Since then we have been working to develop best practice.
We also campaign for the use of refurbished equipment to be adopted as mainstream practice and for more organisations to sell their used IT equipment to companies that can reuse or recycle it.
Headquartered in Harrogate, the company purchases IT equipment from existing users, restores it to factory condition, with performance as good as new and carries out extensive testing. A wide range of servers, storage and networking solutions, laptops, PCs and desktops are supplied to clients across the world.
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The carbon cost of producing new IT equipment is high. Manufacturing a single rack server costs around 1,200 - 1,750Kg of CO2e. Reusing and refurbishment avoids the need for so much new technology.
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Last year, our sales of refurbished servers saved up to 6,700 metric tonnes of supply chain carbon by offering a cost effective alternative to new IT hardware.
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A side benefit was helping to reduce the e-waste problem, which represents 52 million tonnes per year and is the fastest growing waste stream worldwide.
Increasing reuse also helps with resource scarcity too. 23 of the 30 materials identified by the EU as in short or politically unstable supply are present in data centre equipment (servers, storage and networking). Some of the sources of these materials will run out in decades. Mining the seabed has been suggested as a solution. With current recycling technologies unable to recover these materials, reuse represents the best option for avoiding that.
