Top 3 Reasons to Recycle Your E-Waste This Earth Day

To celebrate Earth Day and welcome spring to Michigan, Red Level brought our clients, business partners, and community together to recycle their outdated technology at our annual Spring Cleaning events in Grand Rapids and Novi. The events encourage our communities to act on protecting the earth through proper recycling and helps them to retire outdated technology that leaves their organizations vulnerable.

This year we were able to recycle 5,260 pounds (2.58 tons) of old servers, laptops, scanners, printers, and PCs at our Spring Cleaning events.

When it comes time to clean out your tech storage bins don’t just toss your old technology equipment. Recycle it.

Recycling outdated technology benefits your business in three major ways:

Efficiency

Devices that are over five years old have passed their prime; performing 2.5 times slower with 3 times less battery life when compared to a newer device. Not only is the device itself is no longer efficient, but it will also drag your productivity down along with it. Statistics show that computers that are older than four years can increase lost productivity hours by more than 2.1 times, costing your company more than $1,260. Not to mention, older computers can only run about five applications simultaneously without performance degradation, while newer computers can easily process eight or more applications at the same time. When’s the last time you were only running five apps? I have at least 10 running right now.

Old devices can be expensive to maintain as well. For computers that are more than four years old, the cost to repair and maintain is likely to be an additional $1,700 a year.

The quick math: That’s $2960 per old device per year. How many old devices are running in your organization?

Security

Not updating your hardware and software creates security challenges and risks to organizations. It was probably less of a concern five to ten years ago, but now running antiquated software exposes organizations to potential scanning and hacking risks.

Several commonly deployed servers; SQL, Windows 2008 as well as Exchange 2010 are quickly approaching their end of life. When the software reaches end of life, many software providers stop offering security updates or patches which exposes organizations to significant risks around data loss, hackers and equipment downtime. As the equipment and software age, it is crucial to stay current with the solutions to protect your organization.

Environment Friendly

Electronic devices may make our life more convenient with everything at our fingertips, but we must acknowledge that many toxic chemicals are incorporated in the manufacturing processes to make our favorite devices. Lead, mercury, plastic & polyvinyl chloride (PVC), cadmium, barium, and beryllium are some of the common toxins used to manufacture personal computers. Many of the toxins are extremely harmful to our environment and may cause irreversible damage to human and wildlife. By recycling technology devices properly, we can prevent these toxic chemicals from polluting our environment by leaking into the soil and groundwater.

There are also many precious metals; gold, silver, copper, cobalt, tin, aluminum, zinc that can be reused or re-purposed when devices are recycled properly.

To sum it up, why should you recycle old technology and equipment? It simply is the RIGHT thing to do.

See our Spring Cleaning in action!

For more information about gaining a competitive advantage with digital transformation, contact Red Level today.

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