In 2014, the Basel Action Network (BAN) started the e-Trash Transparency Project. As part of the initiative, they place GPS trackers in decommissioned IT hardware to track the recycling process. BAN recently discovered the Dell and Goodwill partnership, known as Dell Reconnect, exported e-waste overseas. Four monitors traveled from a Washington D.C. Goodwill store to Guatemala. Under the Basel Convention, it is illegal for Guatemala to receive hazardous waste such as e-waste from the United States. Illegal Exporting Repeat Offenders This incident is not the first time Goodwill’s illegal practices […]
Working with the wrong e-waste recycler can put your decommissioned IT equipment at risk. For years, Apple partnered with GEEP Canada to recycle and recover valuable material from used devices. Between 2015 and 2017, Apple sent the firm over 500,000 Apple devices. Unfortunately, the tech giant discovered the devices were still active after conducting an audit. The review revealed that 18 percent of the “recycled devices” were still connecting to the internet. Close to 11,766 pounds of Apple devices were not destroyed before leaving the premises, GEEP confirmed. Earlier this […]
Have you ever stopped to think about what happens to your old technology devices that you drop off at a big box store or local repair shop? Do you drop them off signed into your email with files on your hard drives and your browser search history? If you haven’t thought about that, you should be moving forward. We’re sure Hunter Biden didn’t. Recently, John Paul Mac Issac, a Delaware computer repairman, became embroiled in a scandal after receiving a used laptop. Mac Issac claims Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, […]
In 2018, Microsoft sank a viable data center in Orkey, Scotland. They dropped the submarine-like data center 117 feet; the facility held over 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage. Microsoft’s team believed that placing a data center underwater would lead to more reliability and energy-efficiency. Now two years later, Microsoft retrieved the tanker. The tech giant explained the project successfully revealed considerable benefits. For example, the underwater data center had just one-eighth of a land-based data center’s failure rate. Conventional data centers face issues with corrosion from oxygen, humidity […]
Many big companies such as Google, Amazon, Morgan Stanley, and Jetblue have committed to reducing or even possibly eliminating their carbon footprint in the next decade. In the infographic below, we provide a visual snapshot of the timeline.