Lowering E-waste Through Tech Regeneration
February 14, 2025
3 min read
February 14, 2025
3 min read
The United Nations says 61.3 million tons of e-waste was added to the planet last year — that’s more than the Great Wall of China weighs. Think about the impact that will have on the environment.
We are all consumers.
There’s no way to get around that.
Sometimes it’s difficult to know how and where our decisions affect the planet, particularly when it comes to the consumption of technology in business and the B2B world.
Origina CEO and Founder Tomás O’Leary and HR Director Ross Lowe sat down with two of the three co-founders of This Spaceship Earth, Futurist David Houle and Planetary Ethicist and Naturalist Tim Rumage, Professor of Environmental Studies, Ringling College of Art and Design, at our Empower — Shatter the Status Quo: A Compass for IT Success event.
Together they discussed the role the tech industry can play in the overall cultivation of growth on the planet and how sustainability is just not enough.
Tech regeneration is proactive stewardship and detailed upkeep to seed regenerative technology processes. This fuels renewal and growth.
“There’s been so much degradation in the years since the 50 or so years since the first Earth Day in 1970 that we really have to accelerate what we’re doing,” says Houle.
Recycling and sustainability practices can only take us so far. While sustainability equates to staying at the same level, regeneration focuses on end-of-life use.
“We’re good at extracting and harvesting. We need to put things back,” Rumage says. “All materials are designed to be non-recoverable. We have to mine the resources. There’s no give back in the system.”
Regeneration focuses on the end of life and end of usability of a product. It starts at the design stage with knowing the material is going to be reused from the beginning, so it is created to be taken apart.
“Waste doesn’t really exist in nature. Everything is reused,” says Rumage. “We do the opposite. We design things not to be reused. That’s where the real switch needs to come in.”
When it comes to e-waste, you might be hard pressed to make the connection to the software industry. But when an OEM pulls support of a software product, what happens to the millions of devices that run on that software? Products like ATMs, hardware on factory floors, and hospital equipment that were previously functional are rendered obsolete with a final software version update.
Here’s where Right to Repair can play a vital role in reducing e-waste. The Right to Repair movement believes companies can look past rip-and-replace and move toward extending current functionality.
With the right maintenance, most systems can run for years despite what software OEMs say. It encourages companies to maintain perfectly good systems and avoid the costly and unnecessary upgrades imposed by megavendors when they pull support for software product versions.
By focusing on the freedom to support, repair, and resell, the Right to Repair movement proposes extending product life cycles, repairing rather than replacing, and reducing waste, which decreases the need for new raw materials.
“You can recycle within manufacturing. You can practice Right to Repair to extend the life of products, and then you can design them so that they can be reused to reduce the amount of mining of water use,” Rumage says.
How can companies start implementing regenerative practices?
Things like evaluating e-waste procedures, creating a reusability checklist, and developing a process for tech disposal through approved vendors are all ways corporations can begin their own path toward regeneration.
For example, one way to decrease your corporate carbon footprint is to offset company travel by planting ecosystems that keep the forest going and encourage the constant regeneration of life. These ecosystems can be scaled from the size of a small park up to several miles of new green space.
Origina’s Regeneration Team is working closely with This Spaceship Earth to develop impactful initiatives that can further our commitment to regenerative methods.
“You have to walk the walk,” says Origina HR Director Ross Lowe. “We’re all consumers. There’s choice in everything we do.”
Here are a few things we can practice in the office and at home.
“We all have a part to play in this,” says O’Leary. “We need to talk about opportunities for regeneration.”
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