Chief information officers like to talk about digital transformation, resilience and sustainability. Yet one of the biggest blind spots in enterprise technology is what happens when devices reach the end of their useful life. Too often, vendors collect the revenue at the point of sale and leave organisations to absorb the cost, compliance burden and environmental fallout when the hardware is retired.
That is the argument made by Kwirirai Rukowo, Qrent’s managing executive, wh...
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o says the industry still treats disposal as someone else’s problem. His warning lands at a time when regulators and policymakers are increasingly pushing the opposite view: that responsibility should not stop at delivery.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says sustainable electronics management depends on reducing material use, extending product life through reuse and refurbishment, and recycling what cannot be kept in circulation. The agency has also backed certification schemes such as R2 and e-Stewards to give organisations a way to check whether recyclers meet recognised environmental, worker-safety and security standards.
Policy makers are moving in a similar direction on producer responsibility. The National Conference of State Legislatures describes extended producer responsibility as an approach that shifts end-of-life management away from governments and consumers and towards producers. In electronics, that matters because the volume of discarded devices continues to grow. The EPA has estimated that Americans discarded 2.7 million tons of electronics in 2018, with only about 38% collected for recycling.
Rukowo’s central complaint is that many hardware sellers still do not follow that logic in practice. He argues that claims about sustainability rings hollow unless the supplier can take equipment back, document its chain of custody and prove that devices are refurbished, recycled or otherwise handled responsibly rather than dumped. In Qrent’s view, true lifecycle management should cover procurement, use, decommissioning, return, reuse and recycling.
The company says it operates on that basis through its IT asset disposition programme, taking back obsolete equipment and aiming to keep it out of landfill and waterways. It says devices are refurbished where possible, recycled where necessary and tracked through the process. Qrent also says it measures impact in terms such as e-waste prevented, product life extended and raw materials preserved.
The broader policy debate suggests the issue is not merely one of corporate ethics but of system design. The EPA’s National Strategy for Electronics Stewardship calls for stronger incentives to design greener products, better management of used electronics and less harmful export of e-waste. Separately, the agency and the Department of Energy are developing an extended battery producer responsibility framework that would address recycling targets, costs, reporting, collection and transport.
For CIOs and procurement leaders, the practical lesson is clear: a purchase contract should not be judged only on price, performance and support terms. It should also ask who takes responsibility when a device is no longer needed. If a vendor cannot explain that process, or cannot show credible evidence that equipment is being handled safely and legally, then the buyer may simply be inheriting another company’s waste problem.
That shift in thinking matters because the cost of disposal is no longer just an environmental concern. It is a governance issue, a reputational issue and, increasingly, a compliance issue. As regulations tighten and stakeholders demand more proof than marketing language, lifecycle accountability is becoming part of what it means to be a serious technology partner.
The uncomfortable truth is that sustainability in IT cannot end with the purchase order. If vendors want credit for innovation, they must also accept responsibility for what their products become at the end of the line.
Source: Noah Wire Services
