According to the UN Environment, 80% of a smartphone's carbon footprint occurs during manufacturing, 3% during transportation, and 16% during consumer use. The best way to decrease your electronics footprint is to keep your equipment as long as possible. The same applies for your desktops and laptops. Extend the life of your computer from 2 to 4 years will decrease by 50% its environmental footprint (Ademe Report).

Consider the whole lifespan of your equipments: while they are in your company and their after-life in the 2nd hand market. See above solution for the different lifespan of devices.

Before going any further, try to upcycle your hardware (reclaiming materials for use in new or better products) or any stranded resources (e.g. zombie servers and under-utilised assets). To do so, deploy a light IT Asset Management solution to keep track of your whole fleet and assets.

As a preliminary step, protect your materials: phone cases, covers, screen protectors, adapted computer bags... More than a nice-looking gadget, it's a way to make sure your device will not be easily damaged. To make your device last longer, avoid also extreme temperatures (don't let them near a window under full sun) and frequent charge levels.

Then, before changing any hardware, you should consider two actions:

• Repair/Update your material
• Extend their shelf life.

Some Best Practices for the first step:

• Always try to repair materials before considering buying new ones
• Update the softwares and the material capacities (memories, etc.)
• Replace separately screens, keyboards, desktop etc... according to their own lifespan
• Protect your materials: phone cases, adapted computer bags...
• Before buying hardware, check out their durability estimation (online forums, technical specifications...)

The second necessary step is to extend the shelf life of your IT materials (phones, computers, printers...) via leasing and evolutive material (RAM, batteries...).To do so, you have different options:

• DIY maintenance (you or your IT teams), extremely cheap but reliable though
• Extend warranty contracts: it is seamless and you should always ask for it, at least to increase environmental awareness and push manufacturers to avoid planned obsolescence and move into a circular economy framework. It can be charged a lot by companies but prices can be brought down if you have a large fleet of devices.
• Third-party maintenance, quite reliable and not that expensive. You need to find the right supplier.

If you wish to change your equipments, consider their after-life and prefer the following incentives:

• Sell obsolete / old hardware to your staff at a discounted price
• Donate them to charities
• Sell them to intermediates which will repair and recondition them

Keep in mind that before disassembling, you should conduct an assets audit and see what can be re-used, re-conditioned and what has to be recycled.

If you wish to change your equipments, consider first their after-life and prefer the following incentives:

• Sell obsolete / old hardware to your staff at a discounted price
• Donate them to charities
• Sell them to intermediates which will repair and recondition them

See our solution above "Extend equipments total lifespan: Repair, Keep longer, Find a new usage" for charities and intermediates.

Keep in mind that before disassembling, you should conduct an assets audit and see what can be re-used, re-conditionned and what has to be recycled.

For the hardwares that have to be recycled, do not forget that Electronic waste requires to be segregated from other waste, collected and treated properly, because they contain up to 60 different elements including toxic ones (lead, cadmium, mercury but also PVC, brominated flame retardants...) and rare earth elements (Neodymium, Terbium, Dysprosium, etc.).
Source: IntechOpen

The technologies used to recover those rare earth elements have been improved over time, as they represent a high resale value. Recycling would reduce the risks to harm the environment and the human health, and also the need to mine new raw materials.

You can contract directly with a specialised recycler to dispose of your equipment or bring it back to your suppliers: under the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) on e-waste, suppliers of electronic goods must take back old products, and send them to a licensed recycler.

You may see here details of some e-recycling companies in Singapore.

You have personal e-waste to discard? Here is a list of all collection points available in Singapore.