e-WASTE

E-waste is defined as electrical or electronic devices that can harm people and the environment if thrown into landfills. These devices contain chemicals that contain high levels of toxins, such as mercury cadmium, beryllium and lead. Although there is no harm in their use when these devices are thrown into garbage disposal areas, these toxins can leak into the soil and water over time, causing natural pollution and causing great harm to people, animals and plants. However there are some easy ways to improve e-waste. Reducing e-waste is not just about to remove environmental risks, it also help us to preserve resources and reduce the amount of energy for us to produce these produckts.

HOW TO IMPROWE E-WASTE IN OUR COMPANNY?

There are several ways to ipmrove e-waste except recycling.

• We can get a TCO Certified

What is TCO Certified? Basically TCO Certified is world’s most comperhensive sustainability certificatiion for IT produckts. The TCO Certified criteria promote social and environmental sustainability. Compliance is checked independently throughout the IT product lifecycle, both before and after certification. The criteria go beyond legislation and industry standards and include socially responsible manufacturing. Also include engagement in , user ergonomics, extended product life, reduction of hazardous substances and more.

I just want to point out that we can get TCO Certified on the product, not on the brand name. But this does not cause any problems because this certificate can be obtained for 11 products.

• We can donate our used electronics to social programmes

When we decide to replace our eloctronics with a new one we can donate our used electronics to social programmes to help victims of domestic violance, environmental causes and children safety initiatives. In this way, we not only add value to the name of our company by helping social organizations, but also we do not distribute electronics to the environment.

• Cloud services (cloud computing)

It may seem like a simple addition to our IT setup. However by using cloud services, we can significantly reduce to amount of electronics used in our company. Cloud storage, enables organizations to reduce the number of physical electronic devices they need, including servers and circuit boards. Also cloud-based systems are often easier to maintain and do not require a specialized IT team. Basically we are gonna rent servers online to manage, store and process data instead of using our own server. Worlds most popular companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft use cloud computing. Thus, each user do not need to purchase their own personal computer hence the garbage produced by disposal of them will reduced at the first place itself.

• Urban mining

Urban mining is a new term relating to green IT and electronic waste. What is urban mining? The electronics that people often throw away are a viable source of rare earth metals, and these electronics can be found in all around the world. So, people are now using urban mining as a means of collecting electronic waste and reclaiming the rare earth metals from these unwanted electronics. So, we can make an agreement with the companies that deal with this urban mining business and give them the electronics we don't use. Result of this, we won’t make any e-waste.

• Virtualization

By combining multiple servers under a single physical machine, we can both consume power and reduce our hardware costs to zero. For example, if we provide SQL, file server, terminal server and print server services in our company, we do not need different physical servers for each.

• We can determine our local recycling options

We can locate the recycling areas around us and leave our belongings there. If we cannot find a recycling area near us, we can reach companies that are interested in e-waste recycling. These companies deal with these areas instead of us, and they take our waste from us and dump it in those areas.