Sustainability
A perfect storm for the circular economy
Sophia Haywood-Atkinson, services director, UK, and Jay Allen, business unit director – PC Systems, UK, TD Synnex, explain how resellers and retailers can drive the circular economy and gain a competitive advantage by giving customers viable trade-in and asset disposal options.
B
oth businesses and consumers have been holding back on IT spending over the couple of past years. Tat’s
created a latent demand for systems that can deliver higher performance and greater versatility and it’s an ideal time for the new generation of devices with built-in AI functionality to arrive on the market. As the economy recovers and confidence returns, these factors will create a perfect storm and a surge of upgrade activity. While everyone has been riding out the extended economic
downturn triggered by the unprecedented events of recent times, another important trend has been gaining strength. Sustainability has become vital to every organisation and individual and when they upgrade their devices – or any other hardware – they will want to make sure that their old products do not end up in landfill.
Disposal services Tis is why we believe reseller partners and retailers must be ready to offer prospective buyers an IT asset disposal service for their legacy hardware. Tis is not difficult – we can provide such a service on any IT product, and there are plenty of other options out there. While we are moving in the right direction, we need to do much more to ensure that all hardware is disposed of in an environmentally safe and secure way in the UK. Te interesting thing about this is that offering IT asset disposal is
seen as a real benefit by the customer. It can help a reseller or retailer make a sale; and if they can offer some kind of residual trade-in value on the legacy hardware in addition to that, it can make investing in new equipment even more appealing to the customer. Tis is also something we can offer to all partners. It’s really simple to quote for and to process and a tangible way to add value. Taking back old hardware products and ensuring they are ethically
disassembled and sent for refurbishment or recycling is not only doing the right thing for the environment and sustainability – it is also extremely attractive to the customer and helps partners set themselves apart. As a channel, we need to do much more of this though. Trading-in products and taking them back for renewal and reuse or for safe
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disposal and recycling is something that should be routine for resellers and retailers.
Making progress To be fair, we have made some progress. TD Synnex already takes back hundreds of thousands of smartphones and computing devices and puts them
back into the circular economy every year. Within our Corporate Citizenship Programme, a second Tower of Specialization on Circular Economy was launched with European and Global. But there is much more potential. Tis year will see a big wave of upgrades from Windows 10 to Windows 11 laptops and with every customer looking to upgrade their device, there is the opportunity to offer a trade-in. We think there will be a real acceleration of trade-in activity in
2024 and we are ready to help partners make customers a good offer, along with safe and ethical disposal or recycling, on every traded-in device. We will be ready to help partners with every and any opportunity on all hardware products. In addition, we expect to see mainstream vendors starting to offer
remanufactured devices with full warranty cover and this could be a real game-changer. It’s an option we will definitely be bringing to market as soon as we can.
A new circular economy What we are seeing here are, we believe, the beginnings of a new circular economy for IT that will place much greater emphasis on recycling and, in time, the way new products are made and what they are made from. Hardware vendors are already making good progress on reducing the amount of rare earth minerals and plastic that is used in their products and packaging and lowering the carbon impact of their manufacturing processes. As they bring new generations of more ecologically-oriented
products to market and recycling and refurbishment becomes an integral part of the buying process for new products, we’ll be driving a true circular economy for the industry and moving much closer to the ultimate goal of achieving net zero for the whole product lifecycle.
January/February 2024 | 37
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