Ingram Micro Inc.’s Commerce & Lifecycle Services unit, working with a Dutch environmental firm, has devised a way for the local tech titan to achieve waste-neutral disposal of its employee laptops sold on the secondary market.
The plan amounts to a trade-off involving about 2,400 company-provided notebooks.
The notebooks’ lifespan is extended through secondary market sales; however, Ingram Micro cannot ensure that they are disposed responsibly at end-of-life.
To compensate, Ingram Micro has enlisted Closing the Loop, a sustainable solution provider in Amsterdam that extracts electronic waste from developing countries and ensures that it is responsibly recycled.
The Dutch firm will remove the phone weight-equivalent of the Ingram company-issued notebooks from e-waste streams.
“As an offset for the notebooks, we estimate a 5-1 ratio of cellphones to equal one notebook,” Ingram Micro spokesman Damon Wright told the Business Journal on Aug. 24.
“Closing the Loop will collect 12,000 cellphones in Africa that normally would have ended up in landfill, but instead will be shipped to Europe and recycled.”
Ingram announced the plan on Aug. 20 and has not disclosed any financial terms of the deal with Closing the Loop.
Founded in 2012 by Joost de Kluijver, Closing the Loop offers users, buyers and sellers of IT hardware to engage in sustainable consumption for their devices. It collects African scrap phones on behalf of customers and typically charges its tech customers a few dollars per device collected.
OC Behemoth
Irvine-based Ingram Micro is the world’s largest wholesale technology distributor and the biggest OC company by revenue, with $47.2 billion in sales in 2019.
In recent years, Ingram Micro says it has made significant investments in its IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) services. A core benefit of these services is the ability to extend the lifespan of IT assets and ensure responsible recycling of IT devices.
“It is important to act responsibly and try to compensate for e-waste beyond our control,” said Todd Zegers, vice president of reverse logistics and ITAD at Ingram Micro.
Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services’ ITAD group provides enterprise IT asset disposition, lifecycle support services, onsite data destruction, IT asset repair and reuse, and e-waste recycling services.
US Recycling
“We’re also working with industry leaders and the U.S. government on legislation to help drive more recycling within U.S. borders, rather than exporting devices overseas where we can’t ensure responsible recycling and waste disposal,” Zegers added.
Ingram Micro is also examining how to reduce global e-waste streams more significantly by enabling other organizations to take advantage of Closing the Loop’s services.
HNA Group Rumors
Meanwhile, Ingram Micro is still subject to reports that it may be sold by its parent HNA Group Co., a Chinese conglomerate.
In the latest national report, Bloomberg News on Aug. 21 quoted people with knowledge of the matter as saying U.S. private equity firm Platinum Equity is in advanced talks to buy Ingram Micro in a deal that values the technology distributor at about $7 billion including debt, Bloomberg said. HNA, Ingram Micro and Platinum Equity declined to comment. HNA paid approximately $6 billion for Ingram Micro in 2016.
