Understanding the impact of IT hardware equipment

IT hardware from servers, network equipment, computers, monitors, tablets, and smartphones that an enterprise or organization uses significantly impacts your Scope 2 (energy consumption) and Scope 3 (material use) greenhouse gas emissions throughout the whole life cycle, especially during production and disposal. The extraction of raw materials, such as rare-earth metals and other materials needed in the manufacturing process when creating this equipment, can result in loss of biodiversity, depletion of finite resources, and generates enormous volumes of toxic waste. This also generates social inequalities related to using forced labor in some countries to obtain such rare metals. In many cases, finite resources such as lithium are used to manufacture smartphones and batteries (ISWA 2020). Overall, estimates indicate that producing these nearly equals or exceeds the carbon cost of using them (European Environmental Bureau 2019). The...