The Green Grid and StEP join hands to foster e-waste initiatives

Greentech Lead America: The Green Grid announced a new alliance with international think tank Solving the E-waste Problem (StEP) to advance the “e-waste” discussion and foster solutions that help organizations understand and responsibly dispose of electronic equipment at the end of its useful life.

This focus on office equipment and recycling represents a new area for The Green Grid, which is best known for its measurements, metrics and best practices that improve resource efficiency in information technology and data centers.

The Green Grid sees equipment disposal as a natural next step in meeting the needs of its members, and formed the alliance with StEP to offer expertise and new approaches to solving the global e-waste problem.

Many members of The Green Grid have information technology (IT) managers actively seeking disposal solutions for a generation of electronic equipment – deployed in the digital boom of the 1990s – that is rapidly reaching the end of its natural life.

By working with StEP, which is hosted by the United Nations University, The Green Grid aims to put organizations on track to better understand and manage its outdated equipment.

The Green Grid has built its reputation largely on its activities in the area of IT energy and emissions, most notably focusing on resource efficiency in data centers and enterprise.

By turning its focus to office and electronic equipment and improving organizations’ methods of managing materials, waste and recycling, The Green Grid and StEP hope to unite these previously unaligned areas of IT resource efficiency.

“There have always been two separate discussions in the world of IT and data center efficiency, with one side focused on energy emissions, and the other concerned about material and waste recycling. With this new alliance, we are essentially merging the two camps for the first time to offer leadership on e-waste concerns like the global community has never seen before,” said John Pflueger, Dell representative and Board Member of The Green Grid.

“StEP offers deep understanding of the issues and can help guide our research around e-waste as we work to create new metrics that will help our members stay at the forefront in the area of IT resource efficiency,” Pflueger added.

The Green Grid and StEP have already collaborated on a new metric, Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE), that will help end-users of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) measure their success in the responsible management of outdated equipment. The Green Grid is currently working with organizations interested in piloting the EDE metric.

Ruediger Kuehr, executive secretary of the StEP Initiative, said, “Both The Green Grid and StEP have advanced efficiency across the different sides of the IT equation. Although we are only at the very beginning of the e-waste discussion, we are taking crucial first steps by helping organizations identify and understand all their waste streams, and find the best disposal pathways.”

[email protected]