Blancco, ERI & Start Campus tout greener IT
Blancco and ERI have highlighted their collaboration on secure device reuse and electronics refurbishment ahead of Earth Day. Start Campus has also pointed to the role of sustainable engineering in the next generation of AI data centres.
The comments come amid rapid growth in electronic waste. The UN's Global E-waste Monitor projects that discarded devices will exceed 180 billion pounds by 2030. Less than a quarter of that waste currently goes through responsible recycling streams, according to the report.
This year's Earth Day theme, "Our Power, Our Planet", focuses on the impact of individual and collective action. Technology firms working across hardware, data, and infrastructure are using the occasion to highlight their approaches to circularity, data security, and energy use as device and data volumes rise.
ERI handles IT and electronics asset disposition across the United States. In 2024, it processed large volumes of end-of-life hardware and disclosed figures for its refurbishment activity, including 2.7 million pounds of electronics refurbished during the year and 318,000 components recovered for remanufacturing.
Blancco supplies the data sanitisation software ERI uses on data-bearing devices before refurbishment or resale. The approach separates the treatment of physical assets from the treatment of the digital information they contain. It reflects a broader shift among asset disposition providers, which increasingly market both environmental and privacy outcomes when dealing with used hardware.
"This Earth Day, we're committed to helping minimize the environmental impact of e-waste globally by working with enterprises, ITADs, and mobile processors to adopt device sanitization strategies that increase device lifespans," said Lou DiFruscio, CEO of Blancco. "Organisations continue to manage large volumes of high-end drives, laptops, and mobile phones, as well as devices in emerging categories like wearables. With that, there is a significant and growing opportunity to extend the life of those devices, minimizing landfill impact, reducing the need for new raw materials, and lowering CO2 emissions from new device manufacturing. We're proud to work with forward-looking organizations like ERI to help enterprises forge more sustainable IT operations and enable secure device reuse at scale whenever possible."
Asset disposition specialists now sit at the intersection of environmental regulation, information security, and supply chain constraints for electronic components. Refurbishment and remanufacturing offer enterprises another way to manage devices that no longer meet internal standards but still have resale or reuse value. Data erasure software and processes act as a gate before those devices return to circulation.
ERI presents its work as both an environmental and a data protection function. It links the use of sanitisation software directly to its promise to enterprise and public-sector clients that retired assets will not pose a security liability.
"E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream on the planet, and Earth Day serves as a yearly reminder that we must get serious about circularity and responsible recycling," said John Shegerian, ERI Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO. "At ERI, our mission is to protect people, the planet and privacy. On the 'privacy' side, our partnership with Blancco brings the critical data destruction aspect of responsible recycling to the next level so that private data is never compromised. Blancco's state-of-the-art data sanitisation software helps to ensure that the security of the devices we process is always maintained. We're proud to partner with Blancco to make sure that all kinds of data-bearing electronic devices are responsibly refurbished or recycled and kept out of landfills."
Data-bearing equipment such as laptops, phones, storage drives, and emerging device categories like wearables often contains residual personal or corporate information when it is no longer in primary use. Providers such as Blancco and ERI argue that effective sanitisation supports reuse while addressing regulatory and reputational concerns. The combination of erasure software and audited processing environments is becoming a standard requirement in asset disposition contracts with large organisations.
The environmental focus is not limited to devices. Data centre operators and developers are also responding to pressure over energy use, water consumption, and heat emissions, especially as demand for AI workloads grows.
Start Campus, which develops large-scale data centre sites, argues that sustainable methods are now part of technical design rather than marketing. It points to the growing use of specific cooling and energy systems, indicating that operators are integrating environmental considerations into engineering decisions.
"Sustainable data centre development in 2026 has evolved beyond marketing narratives towards engineering-led solutions. The most significant advances are driven by the deployment of liquid cooling, waste heat recovery and reuse, zero-water cooling technologies, and grid-interactive facility design. Direct access to renewable energy and comprehensive long-term power strategies have transitioned from aspirational claims to core competitive differentiators. The paradigm has shifted. Sustainability and performance are no longer trade-offs. For AI infrastructure, they have become inseparable. High-density AI deployments demand the thermal management and power efficiency that sustainable engineering approaches inherently provide," said Robert Dunn, Chief Executive Officer at Start Campus.
Liquid cooling and other high-efficiency thermal systems have become more common in facilities that host dense racks of AI accelerators. In Europe and other regions, operators are also expected to capture and reuse waste heat where local infrastructure allows. Direct power purchase agreements and dedicated grid connections now form part of long-term planning for many large data centre sites seeking renewable electricity.
Both the device lifecycle work described by Blancco and ERI and the data centre engineering approach outlined by Start Campus reflect growing links between climate goals and digital infrastructure planning. The volume of hardware in circulation and the growth of AI workloads are reshaping how companies present their environmental and energy strategies around IT.