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Green Operations

This section focuses on environmental impacts that we contribute to, and those that are linked to our
activities, products, or services through our business relations.

Materials

We are striving to be a driver for the realisation of SDG 12 within the ITAD sector. The company relies on both
renewable and non-renewable input materials. We prioritise the use of recyclable material components
where possible.
Most of the items we refurbish are less than 10 years old. This would make the items and their components
RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) compliant.

The RoHS directive came into being in 2003. Examples of items restricted under RoHS include lead (Pb),
mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd), hexavalent chromium (CrVI), polybrominated biphenyls (PBB),
polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) and four different phthalates (DEHP, BBP, BBP, DIBP).

There is a wide variety of materials used to make computer components, these include plastic, ceramics,
glass, ferrous & non-ferrous metals. As a refurbishing entity, we only have limited control on the nature of
products we use. We are reliant on the manufacturer’s composition of computers.

Apart from the harvested and newly manufactured components, we use several other processes that
require resources such as water, plastic, paper, and alcohol. We have some form of control on the use of
these consumables. For example, we limit the amount of water we use in instances where we clean the used
computers with alcohol.
An example of how we have exerted control over consumables is that we have been able to save 1.2 tonnes
of plastic that we would typically use for packaging.
Our refurbishment processes repair and replace components at board level so that we do not have to
discard faulty motherboards.

We also harvest components from faulty computers and use them to repair other faulty computers or they
are sold as spare parts.

Materials used by weight or volume

• We currently use plastic wrapping for our packaging. This polyvinyl chloride (PVC) material can be
recycled but is not renewable.
• During the reporting period we used an average of 100 kg of plastic wrapping per month.
• We are currently in the process of doing R&D into alternative renewable and cost-effective
packaging solutions for desktops.
• The only renewable material we use in our production process is water. We have an average water
consumption of about 73.3 kl per month for all in-house processes. (879.8 kl per annum)
• We used 544.3 kg of paper during 2020. In future, we aim to reduce the quantity of paper used by
half to 272.15 kg (this will be achieved by printing on both sides of paper where possible).
• This material is at present ideal for the packaging for our products as it protects items from
mechanical damage in addition to having an acceptably low permeability to water vapour and
oxygen - hence protecting electronic equipment from chemical damage.
• We switched from using thinners to using Isopropyl Alcohol.

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