Corporate sustainability commitments are colliding with an IT environment that changes fast. It consumes more power, generates more waste, and turns over hardware faster than it did five years ago.
We live in an age where equipment has never been more power-hungry. Much of that growth is owed to the rise of AI integrations. Global data center electricity usage hit an estimated 415 to 416 TWh in 2024–25. The IEA projects that number could double over the next five years.
E-waste is also on the rise. In 2022 alone, the quantity of new electronic waste reached 62 million tons globally. Less than a quarter of it was properly recycled.
The trajectory is not fixed. In this article, we’ll take a look at where IT’s environmental impact concentrates, and what companies can do about each piece of it.
Key Takeaways
- Data center electricity use is on track to double within five years, driven largely by AI workloads
- Roughly 80% of a laptop’s carbon footprint is created before it is switched on, which makes extending refresh cycles the highest-leverage change available
- Global e-waste hit 62 million tons in 2022, and recycling capacity is not keeping pace
- Fewer than 10% of companies measure their emissions accurately, which makes IT’s footprint hard to manage or report
Why Sustainable IT Is Harder Than It Sounds
Sustainable IT is not one initiative, but several challenges that overlap. Unfortunately, many of these difficulties exist in the uncomfortable realm of contradiction.
On the one hand, companies want newer, better, and more energy-efficient hardware. But while business objectives may justify pursuing technological change, the old sustainability adage still holds: reuse, reduce, recycle. Often the best thing you can do from an environmental perspective is nothing.
Stagnancy is a foreign concept in the business world. Even companies that resist the pull of new equipment are not free from the potential environmental ramifications of modern business practices.
Sustainable IT is harder than ever in a professional environment that uses massive quantities of energy on artificial intelligence and other kilowatt-intensive technologies.
The Growing Problem of Electronic Waste
The UN’s Global E-Waste Monitor 2024 estimates that 62 million tons of e-waste were generated in 2022.
That indicates an almost doubling of waste from the 2010 figure, and the number is expected to increase by 30 percent by the year 2030, while electronic recycling is on the decline.
Volume is rising because devices are replaced faster than they wear out. The recovery side has not kept pace, which is why less than a quarter of 2022’s e-waste was properly recycled.
Right now, companies are literally throwing materials away. From a business perspective, this is as much a value recovery problem as it is an environmental one.
Refurbishment and recovery services are a good way to breathe a second life into older equipment while potentially reducing the cost. Reconext’s ITAD program helps reduce carbon emissions and preserve natural resources by finding new purposes for old gear.
Short Hardware Refresh Cycles Undercut Sustainability Goals
Approximately 80% of a laptop’s carbon footprint happens during manufacturing.
This is actually good news for businesses that want to start adapting sustainable practices, because it provides a clear and cost-efficient next step: if you want to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas created by your hardware, the best thing you can do is hold on to it for longer.
Extending a laptop’s refresh cycle from three to four years can reduce emissions by up to 25% without creating any consequence at all for the business.
Many companies are adopting condition-based refresh policies. Rather than updating hardware on a schedule, they do so only when the situation warrants it.
It’s not even a controversial decision. Approximately three-fourths of the workforce has expressed a willingness to use their aging devices for longer if it would be beneficial to the environment.
Measuring and Reporting Sustainability Progress
The Boston Consulting Group found that fewer than 10% of companies accurately measure their emissions, primarily due to information scarcity. Businesses don’t know what they should be monitoring, or what kind of information they can use to inform their data collection process.
Much of that data needs to come from the suppliers of software and hardware. Simpler data points that are easy for IT departments to track involve how long they use their equipment, what the refresh cycle is, and whether gear is repaired or discarded.
Tracking this information is a great way to make meaningful progress on sustainability goals.
While sustainability can sound like a difficult or expensive goal, it’s often just as much about what you don’t do as it is about the actions your business takes.
By keeping what you have, prioritizing repair over replacement, and taking a conscientious approach to how you monitor and reflect on your energy consumption patterns, you can make a meaningful difference without sacrificing anything.
Conclusion
To significantly reduce energy consumption globally, it will take more effort than any single business can be held responsible for.
Renewable energy continues to grow; meanwhile, sustainable sourcing efforts work toward a short-term impact on how businesses obtain and manage their electronic equipment.
Climate change is not the responsibility of any single entity to solve, but can be managed through a combination of emerging innovations, environmental regulations, and, possibly most important of all, a continued society-level focus on the development of strategies and systems designed to do more with less.
At the end of the day, these things serve as a competitive advantage as much as they do a gift for future generations. We described in the article above how reducing waste can also result in reducing costs when done strategically. It can also differentiate your business in the eyes of the public.
The financial case and the environmental case point in the same direction. Longer refresh cycles reduce capital spend, and recovery returns value from retired assets. The emissions reporting that follows gives procurement teams and customers something verifiable to evaluate, especially as sustainability performance increasingly appears in vendor assessments and RFPs.
If you’re ready to extend the life of your hardware instead of replacing it, reach out to Reconext to see what a certified refurbishment and recovery program could look like for your fleet.
FAQ
What is sustainable IT?
Sustainable IT is the practice of managing technology in ways that reduce energy use, waste, and emissions across its full lifecycle.
What are the biggest challenges of sustainable IT?
The biggest challenges are rising energy demand, growing electronic waste, short hardware refresh cycles, and difficulty measuring environmental impact.
This has turned into a growing concern across countries with very different levels of infrastructure and regulation.
Data centers already account for a meaningful share of global electricity use, and as that number climbs, companies are under more pressure to show progress, partly because market competition now rewards visible environmental responsibility.
How can companies improve energy efficiency in their IT operations?
Companies can improve energy efficiency by shifting toward sustainable energy sources, such as solar panels or renewable power contracts, and by extending hardware lifecycles instead of replacing equipment on a fixed schedule.
Many governments offer tax breaks or other forms of economic support to help fund this transition. Industry experts also point to new technologies in cooling, virtualization, and workload management as additional ways to cut consumption without sacrificing performance.
Does investing in sustainable IT lead to cost savings?
Yes. Sustainable IT practices tend to generate cost savings over time by lowering energy bills and reducing how often hardware needs replacing.
Stakeholders across a business, from finance to operations, often see this as one of the few cases where environmental and financial goals line up cleanly, which is why industry experts increasingly treat it as a competitive advantage rather than a compliance cost.
