Polite request: Stop donating computers

The IT charity model is broken, writes Nathanial Comer, founder at global non-profit ITAD Sun Screen IT

Shockingly, over 80 per cent of the world’s electronic waste is “unaccounted for”.

It may also surprise you that there are chickens laying eggs which make this grim reality even worse.

Before we come to the chicken, or the egg, us Europeans should feel both pride, and shame. The EU has the highest global level of e-waste tracking and processing at circa 40 per cent of total e-waste.

Sadly, some high-income non-EU countries are tracking at under 10 per cent.

For example; last month Apple sold 37 million new iPhone 16’s on first week pre-order.

Making these 37 million smart phones required 7.25 million tonnes of the earth’s crust to be mined and refined.

But worryingly Apple is one of the leading users of recycled materials, with the iPhone 16 made from around 30 per cent recycled materials. It would otherwise have snaffled over 10.36m tonnes of raw earth mining.

Apple states that its total average use of recycled material is 22 per cent. Put another way, one of the best green manufacturers on earth still uses close to 80 per cent raw mined earth materials. Shocking.

Two things:

1: Conversations about the environment/sustainability/ESG are at an all-time high.

2: Consumption is at an all-time high.

Relentless innovation has inspired unbounded consumption. We constantly adopt new technologies we never previously knew we needed.

Who could now live without being able to check whether it was a fox or a burglar on our video doorbell, or precisely which street the bike transporting the Saturday night vindaloo is on?

Technology outpaces almost every aspect of our lives. Billions of humans, from Sir Christopher Wren to Neil Armstrong were born, lived, and died, without ever knowing the technological miracle of the Ninja Air-fryer. How could one ever go back to cooking using something as pedestrian as an oven?

UNITAR (UN Institute for Training & Research) and WHO (World Health Organization) among many others, state correctly that e-waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world.

So, the question is - Where does all this ‘stuff’ go?

The PCs, the laptop you stopped using 18 months ago, that entire datacentre procured four years ago which was shelved due to a move to cloud; all of those desk phones from the offices which Covid closed down; that huge 1990’s TV you maybe had that took at least two adults to carry into your living room. Remember those?

It was 2008 when I heard the answer firsthand, from two Ghanaian teachers.

Sunday lunch, Somerset. At the time, I was working for a company called Sun Microsystems, selling hundreds of millions of pounds worth of servers, storage, thin clients, & workstations to end user customers from the A-list of the FTSE 500.

But these two Ghanaian teachers, visiting a school in Somerset, sat down for Sunday lunch – and opened a door through which I could not return.

“We have hundreds of PCs,” the headmaster said. “Charities send them to us and they don’t work. We can’t repair them.”

“How do the children learn IT then?” I asked.

“We have pictures of a mouse and keyboard on the wall,” he answered.

Joseph, the other teacher, continued: “The children cannot use computers, they take theoretical IT exams only, so they struggle to enter Further Education, and cannot find professional jobs.”

“But all is not lost” they continued. “There is good metal in these computers, so when we have enough, they are burned, and the metal harvested.”

For four decades, the IT industry has been plagued by a loophole in E-waste disposal, that if hardware is ‘donated’, or ‘shipped for repair’ it does not pass through stringent controls – and is exported. Citizens of West African nations such as Sierra Leone, and Ghana have been the unwitting victims of these ‘charitable donations’ which have, in real terms, created the most toxic places on the face of the earth; places such as Ghana’s post-apocalyptic e-waste dump, Agbogbloshie, outside the capital Accra.

The path to donating unwanted IT is paved with the best intentions…

IT Leaders want to donate their IT – but it’s a prohibitive risk, a prohibitive cost, or both.

The problem is, CIOs and IT Leaders are already overprovisioned with maintaining operational excellence while delivering transformational excellence, and now the list has expanded to include Carbon Reporting, & Carbon Reduction.

IT Asset Disposal (ITAD) has been the most overlooked part of the IT lifecycle. I looked deeper into this, and found ‘The Chicken’, which led to the founding of Sun Screen IT, and the registered Charity, Sun Screen IT Foundation.

Sun Screen IT Group has two core objectives: To transform global IT Disposal from a linear waste stream into a “total circular economy”, and to close the Digital Divide by funding sustainable IT education in areas of economic need. We are funded by the incredible generosity of Centerprise International, who coordinate and deliver ITAD services globally and donate their margin to support our mission of driving Environmental and Social change. When we complete the next two schools in Ghana in January 2025, we will have donated 30,000 academic years of sustainable IT resource.

We disrupted the ‘broken’ IT Charity model. We never donate old IT to areas of economic

need – we champion the accredited ITAD process, extract & sacrifice the margin from that,

and donate fit-for-purpose sustainable IT Labs to schools in need. This means IT assets are

not exported, nor do they ever end up in landfill.

So, what about the Chicken? (Or rather the egg?)

A single egg from a chicken in Agbogbloshie has over 220 times the European Food Safety Authority limit of chlorinated dioxins, and the world’s highest ever brominated dioxins results.

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Carcinogenic, causing birth defects, immune disorders, and in some extreme cases Chloracne, a hideous scarring of the skin from lesions caused by the body’s attempts to handle toxicity from brominated dioxins?

These dioxins come directly from materials such as flame retardants in your discarded IT hardware. In 2022, Global Transboundary E-waste Flows monitor (GTF - UNITAR) reported “uncontrolled” e-waste the same weight as 1.32 billion laptops was shipped across international borders. That’s in a single year.

IT Leaders who choose the ‘free’ route for IT Disposal are putting not only reputation but the planet at risk.

This ‘free’ option offers bare minimum Data Certification and almost always reduces the amount of IT assets being refurbished into the Circular Economy.

But at least it’s ‘free’ eh?

Due to how ‘low priority’ ITAD has been for many organisations, it might be only one person’s decision, even in a $6bn revenue company, as to how disposal is handled. Therefore it only takes ONE voice to make the change and to make ‘IT’ better.

IT has the responsibility to clean it’s own house. Now, with ITAD services such as Sun Screen IT’s partnership with Centerprise International – and with an increasing number of other ADISA accredited ITADs - the decision, we hope, is clearer.