Let's talk about rubbish..

Every time I go to the supermarket I am amazed by the amount of packaging used to "protect" our food (why does my cucumber need a plastic wrapper?) And recently, with lockdown in full swing, we switched to our local supermarket's "click and collect" service which means my shopping very conveniently gets loaded into my car's boot. However, to my horror, nearly every product was in a separate single use plastic bag!

This is one of the reasons why I feel it's important to bring sustainability back on the agenda. Let's not use Covid 19 as an excuse to stop caring and going back to behaviours I thought we had moved past years ago. By the way, Bill Gates agrees, below is his latest note :-)

In this blog, I'll be looking at how technology can help reduce waste and how Microsoft is planning to be a zero waste company by 2030.

Every year, more than 11 billion tons of waste are produced according to the United Nations Environment programme, with very little of it disposed properly and ending up in landfill, water and contaminating our air.

Microsoft's aim is, that by 2030 we will "divert at least 90% of the sold wasted headed to landfills and incineration from our campuses and datacentres, manufacture 100 percent recyclable surface devices and use 100% recyclable packaging and achieve, at a minimum, 75 percent diversion of construction and demolition waste for all projects. " 

Microsoft is going to achieve this by building first of their kind Circular recycling centres to reuse and repurpose servers and hardware in our datacentres. More information can be found here:

Microsoft is also investing $30m in Closed loop partner funds to help accelerate the infrastructure, innovation and business models for supply chain digitization, e-waste collection and recycling products to help build a more circular economy. More information can be found here:

How can Public Sector Help?  

Recycle and reuse of ICT equipment

Extending the life cycle for ICT equipment can be a big gain for the environment; and that can apply to the materials as much as to the manufactured devices.

This has been recognised within government, notably by the creation of Defra e-Sustainability Alliance (DeSA) in October 2019, bringing together a group of major technology companies with non-government organisations, academics and policy makers to make the UK ICT sector more sustainable. It has published an industry guide to sustainable ICT, detailing how organisations can use it to align their work with sustainable development goals.

Microsoft's partner N2S has been advocating the cause of a ‘circular economy’ of ICT equipment through encouraging resale and re-use and developing environmentally friendly processes for extracting rare and precious metals from redundant technology. This has led it into a project with Coventry University – backed by Innovate UK under the Knowledge Transfer Partnership – to harness biotechnology to extract, or ‘urban mine’, valuable material within printed circuit boards in an environmentally friendly way. This would save them from being shipped thousands of miles to refineries where a lot of the material is lost, whilst making those materials available for re-use.

 Enlist Citizens and employees

Another opportunity from a Council's perspective is recycling and reuse - Education of citizens, making recycling easy are quick wins. The use of technology can help by providing data to understand where problem spots for recycling lie so that Councils can provide more encouragement.

 Councils can also chose waste management firms that put sustainability at the heart of their operations and build processes with circularity in mind. One of Microsoft's partners Veolia uses sensors on vehicles and bins to understand when bins need emptying.

You could also build waste challenges to get employees involved in tackling the problem - at Microsoft we will be launching our first waste reduction challenge, a month-long, online challenge connecting individual action to collective impact later this year.

 Please do get in touch if you'd like to hear more or download Microsoft's White Paper "How green is our Digital" below: