Three key takeaways:
- Many companies contribute to the growing e-waste problem by destroying hard drives that could be saved due to data security fears
- Storage manufacturing contributes millions of tons of CO2e each year, which could be reduced by reusing hard drives
- Orange Business has worked with data erasure experts Blancco to securely erase nearly 20,000 hard drives in line with relevant legislation, saving the equivalent of 300 tons of CO2e
In their efforts to improve the sustainability of their entire operations, many companies are now looking at the carbon footprint of their use of technology. It’s not hard to see why. E-waste – discarded electrical and electronic devices – is one of the world’s fastest-growing solid waste streams. From 2010 to 2022 the amount of e-waste generated per year nearly doubled, significantly outpacing formal collection and recycling rates.
A security problem
Businesses certainly have a lot of e-waste. Many have standard policies to replace equipment once warranties expire. For instance, storage devices have between three- and five-year warranties, and they’re removed from data centers at the end of that period.
What happens to those drives? A Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) estimate suggests that 90% of them are destroyed.
Why?
“Security and regulatory compliances are the top concerns of all businesses when it comes to data,” said Adrien Suarez, Environment, Social and Governance Lead for Operations at Orange Business. “They are terrified of it leaking out, so rather than wiping hard drives, they destroy them.”
Understandably, many companies might be concerned with how effectively data can be wiped from storage devices. A Wall Street bank was fined $35 million in 2022 for what regulators called an “astonishing” failure to properly dispose of devices storing customer data, which included using a company that did not specialize in discarding data to dispose of servers and hard drives.
The carbon footprint of a hard drive
Yet every destroyed drive must be replaced, particularly as the amount of data the world generates increases. A joint study by the universities of Wisconsin and British Columbia estimated that the manufacturing of storage devices contributed 20 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2021.
“If we are constantly replacing old with new, then a hard drive’s carbon footprint across its whole lifecycle is extremely high,” said Suarez. “Yes, some drives are obsolete and can’t be reused, but many could be if data can be securely and completely erased.”
It’s a challenge that Orange Business faced when it looked into erasing data from hard drives so they could be reused. The driving force was its commitment to reducing carbon emissions, particularly scope 3, which has an environmental impact five times greater than scopes 1 and 2.
“As a business, we have our sustainability goals, and a key part of that is reducing our e-waste. We know that 88% of scope 3 emissions come from the manufacturing and transportation of products we buy. Where possible, we want to reuse and redeploy hardware, such as servers. If we can find a way of extending the lifecycle of a hard drive, then we start to unlock the sustainability benefits not just of a hard drive, but of servers as well,” said Suarez.
Meeting the regulatory challenge
Any data erasure would have to comply with several regulations. As a cloud provider, Orange has to use NIST 800-88 guidelines, while any erasure method must be validated by ANSSI, the national authority for cyber security in France. It must also be compliant with overarching legislation, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
To meet these compliance requirements, the Orange Business team needed to ensure that it followed the appropriate method for data sanitization and that the appropriate verification was in place. To do that, it turned to Blancco, a provider of data erasure services and the only company that meets all the regulations with which Orange Business needs to comply.
“We have a responsibility to ensure that our hardware is disposed of in the right way; we can’t just hand it over to someone and forget about it. Blancco has the expertise to eradicate data in a fully compliant manner,” said Astrid Clappier, Head of ESG Program Transformation at Orange Business. “Blancco provides several different approaches, which allows organizations like ourselves to reuse hard drives in a way that is most economical.”
Those approaches include:
- Onsite manual cleanup – a field engineer manually eradicates each hard drive with a USB key
- Remote-automatic – industrialized eradication that doesn’t work with all types of hard drive
- Hybrid – a field engineer handles disks while an offsite team cleans remotely. This reduces manual work while still allowing for large volumes of sanitization, but does still require a field engineer to be onsite
“There is always complexity when it comes to erasing data and reusing hard drives,” said Adel Belkacem, Datacenter Infrastructure Architect at Orange Business. “Different servers have to be handled in different ways. So, we use several approaches to come up with the most cost-effective way to eradicate large volumes of data while guaranteeing full and correct erasure.”
Economic and environmental benefits
Orange Business has erased nearly 20,000 of its own hard drives, verified by Blancco. If we had destroyed the drives, manufacturing the same amount would have generated 300 tons of CO2e. Aside from the savings in sustainability, there is also an economic benefit. Eradicating the data costs about the same as having the drives physically destroyed, while also cutting the cost of manufacturing and transporting new devices.
“Historically, the high cost of sustainable solutions has stopped businesses from pursuing them as part of their operations,” said Jonathan Herve, Datacenter Infrastructure Project Manager at Orange Business. “What we’ve seen, by working with Blancco, is that it does not cost any more to erase the data. We can reuse the drives within Orange and avoid the cost of new hardware, or we can sell them to external partners.”
Customer demand for ESG answers
Of course, the most important part of the process is to erase customer data and ensure no risk of leaks in the future. But how do Orange Business customers feel about the company’s reuse of hard drives?
“We’re seeing more RFPs across the entire Orange Group asking about our sustainability practices. On average, 20% of a tender score relates to ESG topics, an approach we’re also taking with our own suppliers,” said Suarez. “When questions come up, they’re often focused on the circular economy, how we’re reusing materials and extending lifecycles. With this hard drive project, we’re not just redeploying drives, but unlocking the circular economy potential of servers and data centers.”
Contact us today to find out how you could benefit from reusing hard drives.
Liliana Rodrigues is a strategic communications leader with extensive global experience in public relations, content marketing and brand strategy. She has developed and executed marketing and PR strategies and campaigns for several international brands. Currently, Liliana focuses on building strategic communication programs for key themes such as corporate social responsibility, AI & digital trust, innovation, diversity, equity and inclusion, and talent acquisition.