Google alone has more than a dozen of these facilities across the world. With increasing and improving services of Google, the demand for data centres kept rising. So, to cut down the waste and convert whatever waste is left to wealth, they employ principles of the circular economy. This circularity strategy complements Google’s vision for a carbon-free and the circular world, but by its very nature, draws from and contributes to other aspects of a sustainability strategy. To make this work, Google has partnered with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to adopt the circular economy practices and leverage its enormous benefits.
To maximise recycling, Google uses a multi-step destruction process to ensure that the data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. In this multi-step process, the first step involves a “crusher” that drives a steel piston through the centre of the hard drive and make them unreadable. They are then shredded before the remains are sent along with other electronic waste to a recycling partner for secure processing. But before any hard drives are removed from the rotation, all data is overwritten and are verified with a complete disk read, so that no trace of customer data can possibly remain on the hard drive.
The decommissioned servers are then taken for a second lap in the circle of life where they’re dismantled into separate components (motherboard, CPU, hard drives, etc.), inspected, and prepped for use as refurbished inventory. Google redistributes commercially useful excess component inventory by wiping clean the unused components and getting them checked multiple times before redistributing them for a resale on the secondary market.
Source: Analytics India
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