Traditionally, there have been three main obstacles to effective, large scale IT asset and materials recovery in just about any vertical marketplace.

Even today,

the first is resistance to change,

the second, partnering and working with a reliable, transparent, and honest recovery network,

and finally the overall economics and complexities and obstacles of achieving full chain of custody tracking when the downstream costs of the disposition are weighted against the residual value of the asset or material being recovered.

Fortunately, 7R addresses these obstacles using all Industry Best Practices.

Going green is becoming more than an alturisitc aspiration to save the planet.

A proactive corporate environmental policy is now essential part of any company’s overall business strategy. Include funding and IT asset disposition early in your strategy to help secure the execution of your green initiatives and lower your total costs.

7R provides the comprehensive infrastructure for accepting, dismantling and disposing unwanted equipment , using the best of industry solutions, and incorporating the 7R’s : Reduce, Reuse, Renew, Recycle, Redesign, Revenue, and Recovery of the complete IT asset value.

Reasons for implementing a Corporate Sustainability Plan :

• >Costs
• >Reputation
• >Requirements
• >Citizenship

Each company is different and approaches to environmental responsibility must be tailored to the needs for the organization as well as its employees, customers , and stakeholders . Developing a sustainability strategy involves : Executive Buy-In , defining specific goals , and execution of the overall plan.

The Global market for revenues from IT and technology End of Life, IT recovery and technology recycling was projected to grow from $5.7 billion in 2009 to $14.7 billion in 2014, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8%.

With the proliferation of new electronics every day, amounts of IT recovered materials and commodities are expected to increase to 400 million or more units annually during the rest of the decade. The future projections suggest that 20 to 50 million metric tons of IT / End of Life materials are generated worldwide every year with the developing countries to triple their expected output.

Unit sales and the key players in the IT asset product sectors including multinational companies and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) continue to demand and push for adopting more stringent and transparent requirements, faster deployment of less toxic materials, and more serious efforts at collection, recycling, and IT asset recovery.

The e-waste issue is hard to grasp due to a lack of comprehensive data. Though there is considerable knowledge about the negative environmental and health impacts through primitive recycling methods, better information about the quantitative and qualitative dimensions associated with the e-waste problem would make it more understandable and be more useful in order to better inform policy making at the private and public levels.

A first-of-a-kind e-waste world-map has been developed by StEP and provides comparable, country-level data on the amount of electrical and electronic equipment put on the market and the resulting amount of e-waste generated in most countries around the world. The StEP Initiative welcomes the submission of additional relevant data, along with a description on how the data has been generated. If you have data and/or documents to submit, or if you have any questions, please contact the StEP Initiative at info@step-initiative.org.

Rare Earth elements that will only get more important. Lithium is lionized. Silicon has a whole industry and valley named after it. Rare earth metals, a set of 17 related metals , are crucial to the way we live now, responsible for smartphones , electric cars , headphones , computers , tablets , the cloud , and more. The time has come to get better acquainted with the materials that make our modern world run.

Lanthanum, first discovered in 1893, is a great example of this. There’s more lanthanum on this planet than silver or lead and it’s the second most abundant rare earth element. Today, every Toyota Prius hybrid car on the road carries with it about 10 pounds of lanthanum. And yet, most of these owners don’t even know they use this rare earth element every day. The “metal” in question is lanthanum and there’s not enough lanthanum on the market today. Toyota is the first and only car company to invest in a rare earth mine.