The recycling center will be set up in Quincy in Microsoft’s home state of Washington. On almost 2000 square meters, technicians and other employees are to ensure that disused servers from the Group’s data centers are either prepared or disassembled and fed to other uses. This is reported by the local business magazine Pudget Sound Business Journal.
Microsoft is trying to recycle almost all servers in the future
The required approval processes on site have already been completed in May, so that the construction of the plant can now begin. In doing so, Microsoft draws on the experience of a pilot project in the Netherlands, where it began to process old hardware in a circular center in 2020. Microsoft has set itself the goal of not having at least 90 percent of cloud computing hardware end up as electronic waste by 2025.
Sometimes donation, sometimes raw material
The better part of the servers that are no longer suitable for further operation in a high-end data center is processed as an entire system. Here, data is deleted and possibly defective parts are exchanged. Subsequently, Microsoft makes this equipment available for charitable or as a donation for educational institutions or charitable purposes.
However, not all servers can be given a second life in this way – because the gigantic data centers of the big cloud providers produce retired devices in large numbers. Therefore, the other computers are taken apart. Some components then also end up as secondary recycling at electronics manufacturers, which can no longer be used any other way, is fed to raw material recycling.
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