Circular Economy Disciplines are Delivering Substantial Cost Savings in Cloud Service Data Centers
The term “circular economy” has become a very familiar one over the last few years. Although not a new concept, it has been promoted as an alternative to the traditional “make-use-dispose” approach. The circular economy is keeping resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them whilst in use, then recovering and regenerating products and materials at the end of life.
IT hardware manufacturing brands have long enjoyed the substantial procurement savings derived from recovering valuable parts from customer returned used IT systems. These organizations either developed reverse logistics operations internally or, more likely, outsourced their ‘recovery for reuse’ operations to specialist services providers. The result is considerable supply-chain cost savings in comparison to newer entrants without such programs. The same is now occurring in the maturing ‘Cloud Services’ industry, where well-established players have already developed programs.
