The Green Grid's New Metric Tackles IT Recycling

biggreen-earthday

The Green Grid continues to broaden its scope. After expanding from data center energy to broader resource metrics, it is now tackling the current state of IT recycling.

The industry group is proposing an electronics disposal metric for commercial end-users of IT equipment, and believes that its new Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE) metric will boost recycling and influence change on a global scale. The Green Grid intends for this metric to be used as a way for organizations to measure themselves and improve over time, rather than as a score to be compared with other entities. We’re looking at you, PUE.

EDE has been developed as a simple, easy-to-use metric for understanding the disposition of IT assets. The new metric was introduced last week at The Green Grid's 2013 Forum in Santa Clara. The goal is to provide a way for organizations to measure the responsible management of IT EEE (Electronics and Electrical Equipment) that reaches EOCU (end of current use) or EOL (end of life and reuse, recycling, and disposal), through providing guidance and maintaining standards.

The EDE describes the percentage of all decommissioned IT assets that are known to have entered a material stream where they will be handled with responsible disposition guidelines. The basic formula is  "Weight of equipment responsibly disposed" divided by "Total Weight disposed" to arrive at the EDE. So in all cases, EDE is less than or equal to 100 percent.

Data for Different Disposal Streams

However, EDE doesn’t stop there. There are also calculations to track the channels and disposal streams. The ultimate goal is efficiency, with proper disposal, reuse or recycling when applicable – so tracking a company’s efficiency when it comes to this metric isn’t cut and dry.

The EDE metric complements the Data Center Maturity Model (DCMM), which contains clear goals and direction for improving energy efficiency and sustainability throughout a data center.

The Green Grid believes the two sides of Green IT are converging: Content (materials/end of life) and resources (energy/emissions/water), and data center (servers storage networking) and the office (desktop laptop workstations). Its metrics continue to address this evolution. Over the past few years, The Green Grid has developed a series of metrics to evaluate and improve data center operations. This includes Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Data Center Energy Productivity (DCeP), energy reuse effectiveness (ERE), data center compute efficiency (DCcE), and others.

The Green Grid delves far deeper into this in a white paper that also discusses considerations, the development of the metric, goals for EDE, considerations and recommendations.