Blog by John Vass-de-Zomba, IT Environmental Sustainability Manager

During the kit amnesty last month, staff and students handed in their unwanted kit to IT Services at several drop-off points across campus – both personal property and the University’s. Over the week, around 1,370 devices were handed in to be reused, refurbished, and recycled. These devices plus all the cabling, peripherals and random bits of technology weighed in at a whopping 5.5 tonnes!

Of this, around 300kg of devices were retained by the University for re-use. An additional 1.5 tonnes of PCs, laptops, mini-desktops, mobile phones and tablets were re-used by our partner Stone Group in other ways, such as charitable donations or stripped for parts. Any remaining devices were stripped of reusable materials, before being incinerated to generate electricity.

John Vass-de-Zomba, IT Environmental Sustainability Manager, said: “I was amazed by the response we had from staff and students – I thought we’d measure the amount of kit by weight not number of vans! The day we held the drop-off point in Stopford building was by far the busiest. We couldn’t keep up with transferring the handed-in kit to our processing warehouse and had quite a backlog to deal with the next day. It was a tough job spotting the kit we could re-use amongst all the weird and wonderful things handed in, but we did pick out a load of re-usable University devices. Each of these means one less new device purchased, with its associated environmental impacts avoided. When these are added up, it come to a significant amount of greenhouse gases, mining waste and e-waste that were prevented.  And beyond this, Stone Group managed to get some kind of usage out of around another 500 devices, which again is a lot of avoided device lifecycle environmental impacts.

I’m really grateful for all the support from colleagues in ITS, Libraries, Estates, the Museum and across the Faculties. Too many people to mention here but a warning to you all: No good deed goes unpunished and as this was such a success, I’ll be knocking on your door for help with another IT kit amnesty next year!”

Still got kit you want to donate?

IT Services can process and make best use of a variety of University equipment such as:

• Laptops
• Desktop computers
• Monitors
• Mobile phones
• Keyboards/mice
• Docking stations
• iPads/tablets

You can drop off items like these at the Kilburn building Support Desk, or request it be picked up for processing by raising a ticket in the Support Portal.

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