Five years ago, nobody in a sustainability team asked what happened to old laptops. Now the question turns up in carbon reduction plans, supplier questionnaires and tender scoring. This guide explains where IT disposal genuinely fits in ESG reporting, which figures are worth having, and where suppliers tend to overclaim.
Three pressures meet in the same place. Larger organisations are reporting more of their indirect emissions; public sector buyers increasingly score carbon and social value in tenders; and customers ask their own suppliers for evidence they can pass up the chain. Retired IT is a small part of most footprints, but it is one of the few places an organisation can show a measurable, evidenced improvement quickly.
Most organisations report emissions using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. IT disposal touches Scope 3 — the indirect emissions in your value chain — in two places:
| Category 5: waste generated in operations | Emissions from treating the waste you produce, including retired IT. Whether it is reused, recycled or landfilled changes the figure. |
|---|---|
| Category 1: purchased goods | The embodied emissions of equipment you buy. Keeping devices in service longer, or buying refurbished, reduces this — usually by far more than anything in Category 5. |
Suppliers bidding for central government contracts worth more than £5 million a year are required to publish a Carbon Reduction Plan, a requirement introduced by Procurement Policy Note 06/21. The plan covers Scope 1 and 2 emissions and a defined set of Scope 3 categories — one of which is waste generated in operations. If you sell to the public sector, your disposal arrangements feed directly into a document your bids depend on.
Public sector tenders now routinely score social value alongside price and quality. IT disposal can contribute evidence in a few honest ways: equipment refurbished and returned to use rather than destroyed, a local supply chain rather than a national broker, and — where it genuinely happens — refurbished devices reaching schools, charities or people without one. The key word is evidence. A social value claim with no figure behind it scores poorly and invites questions.
As a count and as a share of the total. Usually your strongest figure.
Tonnes processed and how they were treated. Useful, but says nothing about the data.
Metals, plastics and batteries by stream, ideally with the processors named.
How many data-bearing devices were sanitised or destroyed, and to what standard.
Reported separately from your footprint, with the method and assumptions stated.
Ask how each number is calculated. A reuse figure built from device counts is easy to check; a carbon figure from an undisclosed methodology is not.
For the wider question of which sustainability claims stand up, see green claims and IT disposal.
Every collection comes with chain-of-custody documentation. Our Premium service, at £5 per device, adds serialised asset logging, a tamper-evident Blancco certificate per device and the ESG data above — device counts, reuse and diversion figures — with the method explained rather than asserted. The detail is on our ESG and compliance reporting page.
Call us and ask. We would rather give you a straight answer than a brochure — even if the answer is that you do not need us.
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