Data centers, whose expansion is being fueled dramatically by the artificial intelligence boom, have a far bigger carbon footprint than previously estimated, according to a new study. The sprawling, power-hungry sites, used to store critical IT infrastructure like servers, are being built worldwide by companies and countries as AI applications…
The big issue is that there’s no risk and hardly any cost to the landfill, while there’s a bit of work and thinking required for reuse, with not much more benefit than that it’s doing the right thing.
And you don’t get to become a capitalist overlord for doing the right thing.
It’s high time that tax codes and regulation make dumping e-waste and unsorted trash extremely expensive.
I agree on the risk aspect and that was the driving force. I had more examples I got from the exec’s like “What if one of these old servers burn a house down? Who you think they are going to sue”.
Also on the recycling side that there are checks in place that if say my company says “no” to refurb that they shred the servers up and recycle the bits they can.
But something has to give, over my career I have seen so much just be carted off to the landfill it would make you sick. And I worked small data centers. Nothing like what they are proposing now.
Yeah, that’s mostly a regulation/legal incentives situation, combined with lack of education on the side of the execs.
It is possible to sell devices as “defective”, even if they aren’t defective. That way you don’t have warranty or other legal obligations.
Similar story with the “Scrap the whole device for data privacy reasons”. That’s not a thing. Scrapping the storage media, sure, totally. Scrapping the mainboard, case and power supply? That’s crap.
But the main issue is that there’s no incentive for companies to reuse devices versus scrapping them. So they scrap the whole thing without regards to anything else, because it’s a single decision that requires no further thought und it’s cheap enough that it doesn’t matter.
If they’d have to pay for full recycling cost, so the cost for actually turning 100% of the device back into usable raw components, then they will instantly start giving those away for free.