Seagate is a leading provider of data storage solutions, and a founding member of the CDI. “If we can universally, among all of our customers, trust that that we have secure erase, then drives can be returned to use,” says Amy Zuckerman, sustainability and transformation director at Seagate. “That is happening, but on a very small scale.”

In its 2022 financial year, Seagate refurbished and resold 1.16 million hard drives and solid-state drives (SSDs), avoiding more than 540 tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste). That includes drives that were returned under their warranty and drives that were bought back from customers.

A pilot take-back programme in Taiwan recovered three tonnes of e-waste. The challenge now, Ms Zuckerman says, is to scale the programme up.

Refurbished drives are tested, recertified and sold with a five or seven-year warranty. “We are seeing small data centres and cryptocurrency mining operations pick them up,” she says. “Our successes have been on a smaller scale, and I think that’s probably true for others engaged in this work too.”

There are no projections for how many times each drive can be refurbished and reused. “Right now, we are just looking at that double use,” Ms Zuckerman says.

There is huge potential for such schemes. A large proportion of the 375 million hard drives sold by all companies in 2018 are now ending their warranty.

For drives that can’t be reused, Seagate looks first at parts extraction and then materials recycling. In the Taiwan pilot programme, 57% of the material was recycled, made up of magnets and aluminium. Innovation is needed across the industry to help recover more of the 61 chemical elements used in the drives, Ms Zuckerman says.

The principle of sanitising and reusing hardware also applies to other devices, including routers. “Just because a company has a policy of replacing something over three years, it doesn’t mean it’s defunct for the entire world,” says Tony Anscombe, the chief security evangelist at IT security company ESET.

“A large internet service provider (ISP) may well be decommissioning some enterprise grade routers that a smaller ISP would dream of having.”