The BLOG

Building a circular economy to deal with our e-waste challenges means embracing a new level of industry-wide transparency.

No company wants to be at the center of a laptop-born data scandal, but the honest truth is that data security breaches do happen, even with the best of intentions. Now just imagine the added struggles of managing, recycling, or disposing of those devices during the pandemic while everyone is untethered and working from home.

Companies that are truly invested in building proper circular processes shouldn’t just rely on recyclers’ certifications. There are steps companies can take to strengthen their processes, instead of assuming that recycling is being handled in the right way.

In the article Why do we need ITAD? Our Future Depends on it, we uncovered how a properly managed IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) program can help save the planet from a steadily growing amount of e-waste. This article will focus on an honorable way corporations can counteract this e-waste problem by extending the life of their PCs and laptops through a computer donation program. 

E-waste is a massive global problem that seems to be growing in severity every year. This trend is expected to continue, with projections showing that by 2030, annual e-waste generation worldwide is likely to increase by approximately 30 percent. With this level of growth, business as usual (i.e. a linear economy) is not an option!

If you’ve been to a cafe in any major city pre-pandemic, with tables occupied by a sea of laptops, then you know that these devices were already essential. Now imagine laptop usage has only increased since 2020, with the pandemic-induced work-from-home lifestyle sending buyers into overdrive, creating laptop shortages that some claim will last into 2022.

At this point, you probably don’t need me to tell you that we have a plastics problem. In the last five years, we’ve sounded the alarm about single-use plastics and the burden their use has placed on the planet.

Electronic waste is becoming the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world, and this poses a serious challenge. The need to properly manage and recycle this waste offers us the opportunity to transform our throwaway culture.

Our economy builds products, sells them, and dumps them, but what happens next? With the passing of time comes the need to adapt, and the global economy is no exception to the rule:

Are you going to try to get past that?! According to a 2015 study by IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average data breach now costs a total of $6.5 Million or about $217 per lost or stolen record. That’s a new record high, and the trend is definitively on the way up. So what can you do to prevent or (God forbid) recover from a data breach?

Sanitization is the bedrock of a strong ITAD strategy and the primary risk-mitigator on hardware that has aged out of regular use. Should you trust Certificates of Destruction to prove that a contract company has safely sanitized your data?

Zynga was at it again. Times had changed, and they needed to change with them. Back in 2009 in an effort to curb excess technology spending, Zynga made the decision to migrate partially out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and onto a hybrid cloud powered by CloudStack.

Since their foundation, logistics companies have delivered from manufacturers to distributors to customers. They honed the process and streamlined it into a (transportation) science. UPS, for example, became famous for their “no left turns” policy1. But for a long time traditional logistics nursed a growing problem.

Upgrading equipment, decommissioning apps, or migrating to a new data center can be a risky time in any IT lifecycle, and when you’re decommissioning hardware and moving on you need to be prepared. We’ve done a few of these in our time, so we’ve pulled together a couple of questions to help you navigate the choppy waters.

Apto Solutions, a global leader in Information Technology Asset Disposition (ITAD) and Lifecycle Asset Management Solutions, has been positioned as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s December 2013 Global ITAD Magic Quadrant. The recently published ITAD Magic Quadrant has shifted from a North American to a Global focus, due to increasing demand from multi-national companies requiring high-quality, coordinated global solutions.

Sure, we have certifications. But so do a lot of companies. The importance of certifications isn’t in having them, it’s in the change in mindset and process that they represent in your organization. Here are the certifications that we chose and why we put in the work to get them.

It is with great pride and excitement that we announce Apto Solutions’ most recent achievement: The Circulars 2018 Young Global Leaders Award for Circular Economy (SME).

Procurement is a tough gig. You have pressures from all sides. From your suppliers who are trying to creep costs up over time to stakeholders who demand an increasing speed of business to management who wants to cut costs as far as possible. You’re more than a buyer of things, and it’s time to prove it.

Think ITAD is just for old, out-of-date hardware? Think again. The high-frequency trading industry it renowned for it’s cutting edge technology improvements. They helped ditch fiber and move to microwave to increase the bandwidth and reduce latency between New York and Chicago. 

How can your recycling process improve the future of your infrastructure? Iteration and the ability to move quickly. When it comes to agility, we should look to the companies that need to be the most agile: startups. They learn step-by-step and have to move quickly or they will die.