Adopting simple practices can boost sustainability and profit

Device life and death cycle

If there is one significant step channel companies can take towards this end, it is in refurbishing and reselling used equipment.

Jeff Kaiden, supply chain consultant and CEO of Capacity, says: “This isn’t just about saving money, it prevents unnecessary waste and reduces demand for new production, which cuts down on resource consumption. Many businesses already use refurbished IT equipment, and the demand keeps growing.”

According to Mohbeen Qureshi, vice-president of growth for offline marketing business Oppizi: “Nearly 60% of UK businesses now opt for refurbished tech over new devices, proving there’s a strong market for recovered and renewed hardware.”

Producing smartphones, laptops and other devices requires significant energy, water and raw materials, such as rare earth metals, which are often sourced unsustainably. In fact, the production of devices such as smartphones and laptops is estimated to be around 30% of the total of tech industry carbon emissions.

While 30% of total carbon emissions might seem like an unfeasibly high figure, consider that around 1.2 to 1.4 billion smartphones,160 to 200 million laptops, and 80 to 100 million new desktop PCs (not shipped) are manufactured each year. And adding oil to the fire, these devices have an average shelf life of around three years. Put this together and the perpetual cycle of device life and death results in massive carbon emissions.

Nancy Powell, sustainability lead for HP EMEA, says: “Sustainability is a great opportunity for channel partners to distinguish themselves from competitors. For instance, taking back four-year-old devices, refurbishing and reselling, helps them to stand out from the crowd.”

Sustainability is a great opportunity for channel partners to distinguish themselves from competitors

According to Gartner, HP ranked second in PC shipments in 2024 with 21.6% of the market, behind first place Lenovo with 25.5% of the market. In effect, this equates to approximately 53.5 million personal computers shipped worldwide by HP.

Estimates vary on how many kilograms of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere for each PC that is manufactured, but the consensus is between 400kg to 800kg CO_2, with high-end models potentially exceeding 1,000kg CO₂, with this number including production, transportation and usage phases.

If we take 500kg CO₂ as an approximate average for each manufactured PC, and based on Gartner’s figure of 245.4 million PCs shipped globally during 2024, it means 122.68 million metric tons of CO₂ was released into the atmosphere last year. To get a sense of how much CO₂ that is, imagine the emissions from around 26 million cars driving for a year.

Calculating the carbon footprint of an electronic device is an extremely complex exercise, and manufacturers provide only shaky approximations, so while these figures are not exact, they are near enough to provide a sense of scale.

Vendors such as HP, Lenovo, Dell, Apple, Acer, Asus and others are clearly aware of their CO₂ emissions, so it’s not only in their interest to get channel partners to embrace the circular economy, but they also feel the weight of responsibility in the face of government pressures.

This works in the favour of channel partners because manufacturers have developed programmes designed to help partners adopt sustainability practises. For instance, HP has its Amplify Impact programme, Lenovo its 360 Circle, and Asus its quirkily named Earthion platform, all of which make it easier for channel partners to embrace the circular economy.

Take Lenovo’s 360 Circle as an example. It says the partner programme “helps … to align on common goals, best practices and sustainability strategies to offer a collective approach to success as a group, rather than leaving each business to its own journey in isolation”.

Mighty cooling tower

As the world’s leading PC manufacturer by market share, according to Gartner, Lenovo is chucking out CO₂ like a mighty cooling tower belching out steam. Its 360 Circle is clearly an acknowledgement of this, and the programme is designed to make it easier for partners to engage in the circular economy in a practical manner.

Of course, not all vendor partner sustainability programmes are created equally. Programme maturity varies from vendor to vendor, whether they produce PCs, servers, networking equipment or other.

Sébastien Juras, sustainability and transformation director at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, makes an obvious but easily overlooked point: “As part of a comprehensive sustainability strategy, channel vendors should evaluate their technology providers to ensure that they take the issue of e-waste seriously.

“Many electronics contain toxic materials that can contaminate soil and water supplies … they contain materials that are non-renewable, such as gold, silver and aluminium. According to the UN, 62 million tonnes of e-waste were produced in 2022, and this is on track to increase to 82 million tonnes each year by 2030.” To provide a sense of scale, that’s the mass equivalence of around 8,000 Eiffel Towers.

Many channel vendors will see sustainability as a trade-off – for instance, it could slow things down or make operations more costly and complex. But aligning with a vendor that has embedded sustainability into its strategy and has a focus on the channel could make it a lot easier to integrate sustainability into the business.

And sustainability isn’t just confined to hardware. Mphasis, an IT service and consulting company, extends its sustainability ethos to software engineering practices.

Ashish Devalekar, senior vice-president, and head of European operations, says the company “leverages digital transformation tools such as AI, IoT and cloud computing to optimise resource efficiency … [and] reduce waste”, which is another way of saying sustainability is important to its operations.

Tweaking web designers

A further case in point is Ditto Umbraco, an open-source content management system built on .NET (ASP.NET Core) technology.  In 2023, Umbraco began working with its channel partners to share sustainable web design practices. In short, web designers have been given the tools to make lots of tweaks that reduce energy consumption and CO₂ emitted by servers, data transfers and client devices.

Panayot Kalinov, senior software developer at Casinoreviews.net, says in six years of leading dev teams he has seen sustainability become a critical issue in the tech industry: “I’ve seen how sustainability can influence purchasing decisions. It’s not just about doing the right thing, it’s about staying competitive. If a channel tech company wants to improve in this area, the best thing it can do is focus on a circular economy.”

It’s easy to think of the drive towards sustainability as just more big stick compliance.  But it’s the implications of rising CO₂ emissions that has governments worried – the fear of cascading changes to ecosystems, economies and societies, ranging from health risks and threats to food and water supplies, to mass migration and conflict.

Given the weighty implications a company that can put a sustainability badge on its credentials, even if it’s offering refurbished and certified pre-owned equipment, it’s likely to win more business. This may not be immediately evident, but as an example, HP’s Nancy Powell, says: “Given that the public sector is [now] giving significant weight to sustainability, it can be a contract winner.”

But what about those channel companies that look at an RFP/RFI, see the sustainability tick box and think, “We’re not doing anything sustainable”? Well, think again. What about the office you’re renting or own? Powell adds: “Office management increasingly incorporates sustainability practices, and in many cases, it’s becoming a standard expectation. So, you may think you’re not practicing sustainability when you are.”

Sustainability can influence purchasing decisions. It’s not just about doing the right thing, it’s about staying competitive

For instance, this can include smart lighting and heating, using eco-friendly office supplies, minimising single-use plastics, encouraging the use of reusable items, installing low-flow toilets and taps, prioritising green building certifications (such as Breeam) and more. So, you probably can tick that RFP/RFI box.

Sustainability is pretty much a permanent fixture on C-suite agendas and, according to Geoff Greenlaw, vice-president of channel, EMEA and LATAM, at Pure Storage, it is “one of the top three requirements in all tenders we see and has been for a number of years”.

This explains why Pure has ploughed a lot of resource into sustainability. “Our technology is engineered to take up less space and use less power to operate, reducing datacentre footprint by up to 77% and saving customers up to 85% in energy use,” adds Greenlaw.

Engaging with a vendors sustainability programme requires partners to understand what the vendor wants to achieve. Does it have carbon reduction targets and/or dedicated circular economy initiatives such as recycling and refurbishing hardware? The aim is to get a sense of the vendor’s objectives and how you can become part of the chain.

Depending on your channel role ,a level of adaptation reflecting your operations may be required. The programme may need to be tailored to something that you can realistically achieve. For instance, if a vendor has a circular economy IT programme, you might need to provide logistics support for hardware returns and create a resale or refurb channel and a vendor should be able to help to facilitate changes.

That said, channel companies ideally should see a clear business opportunity in a vendor’s programme. If it’s just a compliance task, you may feel burdened by sustainability expectations, rather than feeling supported.

Adopting circular economy practises might seem like an onerous task, but it can be straightforward. Other than refurbishing and reselling IT equipment, channel companies can offer trade-in programs, encourage businesses to lease rather than purchase outright, partner with e-waste recycling firms, offer cloud-based tech to reduce the need for frequent hardware upgrades and more.

If you don’t want to go down the vendor sustainability route, independently adopting a few of these simple steps, and others, can put a channel vendor firmly on the sustainability map as well as providing a wider net to cast for new business, without putting directors in the red stress zone.