FreeICT Partner of CEDaCI Research
Free ICT Europe has become a full partner NW Interreg funded research project “Circular Economy for the Data Centre Industry” (CEDaCI)
CEDaCI is a multi-disciplinary network that bring together actors and experts from all IT life cycle stages and sub-sectors directly and indirectly associated with the Data Centre Industry.
Although the projects looks at water usage, toxicity waste and carbon emissions as part of the lifecycle analysis, CEDaCI has a particular focus on the recovery of Critical Raw Materials of servers. Full lifecycle approaches are vital in Circular Economy and the CEDaCI pilot projects reflect this.
Pilot projects have been initiated on series of eco-design guidelines for circular manufacture that reduce the amount of materials need in servers, increase the ability to interchange component parts and facilitate recycling.
Parallel work is being carried out on the midlife equipment with a project that covers refurbishment and reuse. The output of this Pilot is a series of business models that demonstrate the value of refurbishment and reuse. Recent research Techbuyer (Board member FIE) published in the IEEE proves that refurbished IT equipment performs identically to new and can outperform if configured correctly. This puts the sector in a strong position to extend product lifecycles and transnational cases are being developed to this end.
We believe that the alliance with CEDaCI will strengthen our position and support our objectives in obtaining standardisation in ICT serviceability and secondary supply in Europe for our industry and end user organisations in Europe.
