IN WITH THE OLD
SUSTAINABILITY - 2 MINUTE READ
In April of 1981, Adam Osborne released the Osborne 1 – broadly regarded as the first truly portable computer or laptop. It weighed just over 11 kg. A few months later, IBM launched the IBM 5150 – its first PC and something of a game changer – which amongst other features, had a convenient 6-foot-long keyboard cable to facilitate flexible working. By the end of that year, a little Swindon-based PC reseller called Computacenter had been founded by two British entrepreneurs, Philip Hulme and Peter Ogden.
By 1985, around 13% of UK households owned a Personal Computer of some sort – which is a pretty significant rate of uptake when you consider that just a couple of decades earlier, a computer needed about ¼ acre of space and 60 technicians on the go. By 1990, the new age of information was well and truly established, with computing becoming a business-enabler, rather than a burden. By the time the Millennium Bug loomed at the end of the 20th century, computing was an integral feature of the workplace, and along with most businesses, about a third of all UK homes were wringing their hands about the chaos their PCs would unleash while ringing in the New Year!
Incidentally, 1999 was the year that Computacenter – by then a publicly listed Technology and Services Provider with a presence in the UK and France – first acquired RDC, its Circular Services division. The RDC solution was a simple one; customers could maximise the return on their investment in technology through reuse or remarketing and mitigate their environmental impact for devices that had reached the end of their life through responsible recycling. Perhaps it was no coincidence that our first Circular Services customer was the Environment Agency – and they remain a customer today.
So much has changed in the world of IT during Computacenter’s lifetime, and given our unique portfolio of services, we have been a part of that change from the introduction of the new, to the disposal of the old. We’re delighted to be able to share some of our fascinating journey with our customers through the introduction of our new technology Product Museum within the Customer Suite at our Circular Services Center in Braintree, Essex.
Our retrospective exhibition enables our customers to see some of the devices that have changed the way we live and work, which have been professionally refurbished, catalogued, and curated by period. Whether it’s a nostalgic walk down memory lane or a startling insight into what the world used to be like, it’s well worth a visit…and we can talk about how Computacenter can help you to achieve your Sustainability goals, too.
These days, it’s estimated that the average person in the UK now has access to around 9 internet-connected devices, and the Digital Economy Council estimates that the UK tech ecosystem is now worth over $1 trillion – the first country to breach this threshold outside of the US and China. That’s a lot of kit. It’s also a lot of investment, a lot of carbon, and a lot of potential waste. It’s little wonder that Sustainability is becoming such an important topic in the IT industry, not to mention the broader economy.
Computacenter’s Circular Services division processed over 1.9 million items last year. Our priority is to redeploy or resell wherever possible; it delivers the best financial outcome for our customers and extends the usable lifetime of each device. Where equipment must be recycled, we’ve delivered thousands of tonnes of valuable raw materials that re-enter the value stream to help build the next generation of technology – 617 tonnes in 2022 alone. This ensures that over 99% of everything we process avoids landfill.
We look forward to welcoming our customers to our new Customer Suite and Product Museum. Whilst there’s so much we can all do, individually and collectively, to secure the future of the planet, we feel very strongly that Circular Services is an area where we can really make a difference, and we’d love all of our customers to be a part of that journey.