CIRCULAR ECONOMY FOR DATACENTERSVersion 1.4

As part of its mission to reduce the negative impact of datacenters on the earth’s resources, the Infrastructure Masons Sustainability Committee is publishing overview documents to help increase awareness of ways that organizations can drive positive change.

This document is focused on ways that the Circular Economy concept can be applied by datacenter designers and operators as part of a holistic strategy to reduce their consumption of resources and impact on the earth.

ABSTRACT

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CIRCULAR ECONOMY FOR DATACENTERS

Datacenters of all sizes can accelerate their progress towards sustainability goals by taking a more holistic look at the way they use resources. The Circular Economy concept, outlined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, asks us to redefine waste as a resource for another process.

Sometimes these resources can be used as an input to the same system that created them, making new from old. In other cases, it is more practical to find other parties and processes that can use an output from our process as an input to theirs. In model cases, entire industrial parks have been created in a symbiotic system, each using the others’ “waste.”

“TO DRIVE POSITIVE CHANGE, PROVIDERS IN THE IT AND DATACENTER INDUSTRY NEED TO RE-THINK LONGEVITY, MATERIALS, AND LIFECYCLES WHEN DESIGNING BUILDINGS AND TECHNOLOGY.”

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CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN THE CONTEXT OF DATACENTERS

However, applying circular economy concepts to datacenters is challenging. While datacenters consume large amounts of electricity, in operation datacenters use relatively little physical material. Plus, the materials that are output, mostly used IT gear, are complex and difficult to use as inputs to other processes.

For example, it is costly and wasteful to dis- assemble IT gear into different streams of useable materials, and its often difficult to find a process that wants them. In most cases, it is far better to keep the assets intact and find a second life for them.

This circular economy challenge for datacenters is exacerbated by the speed of technology advances and rapid replacement of equipment. This makes it all the more important that datacenter operators include in their vision a plan to get the most value from equipment by extending useful lives, cascad-ing resources to other workloads, and planning for successive lives.

These strategies are the primary way datacenter operators can reduce the negative impacts of IT equipment. Life cycle management decisions should include a full understanding of the embed-ded energy from manufacture of the existing and new equipment, their power draw and efficiency in use, and what happens to the replaced equipment. These are not straightforward calculations but are necessary to understand the sustainability impacts of equipment refresh decisions.

The combination of designing datacenters, oper-ating them, and planning the asset lifecycle with a vision for resource circularity opens vast opportu-nities for improvement. This opportunity extends across the datacenter ecosystem, including the physical buildings, the critical power and cooling infrastructure, as well as the server, storage, and connectivity gear that resides within it. Gaining full value from these assets requires coordination across the IT and facility strategies of organiza-tions, which isn’t always easy! Organizations that don’t have the resources to leverage circular principles by themselves may want to consider leveraging IT partners and providers that can help.

“GAINING FULL VALUE FROM THESE ASSETS REQUIRES COORDINATION ACROSS THE IT AND FACILITY STRATEGIES OF ORGANIZATIONS.”

Longer-term objectives include designing da-tacenters and technology in a way that includes consideration for material sourcing and the ability to re-use materials. These objectives may be more difficult for enterprise-owned or smaller datacen-ters to achieve because of the scale and level of standardization needed. But as more workloads shift to large cloud service providers, these highly automated, standardized environments may be better prepared to drive facility and material re-use.

Near-term actions that are in line with circular principles include re-thinking infrastructure asset lifecycles. While the most demanding workloads may need the latest and greatest processors, most compute loads and the rest of the IT gear that supports it could last through several upgrades. Thinking in a circular manner should span from IT equipment design all the way through to how it could be repurposed for another role and then eventually recycled.

Given the strong momentum for sustainability and the drive for more action and accountability from investors, employees, and students (future talent), we expect more investment and innovation will be coming. Following are some more specific exam-ples of Circular Economy strategies at work today in datacenters:

• Using “waste” heat. Perhaps the biggest opportunity to apply circular economy concepts to datacenters is the use of heat from datacenters, such as in district heating systems, comfort heating, heating swim-ming pools, spas, greenhouses, or industrial processes.

• Power sharing. Datacenters are being integrated into the power grid to provide back-up power to the community when it isn’t needed by the datacenter facility. In other cases, datacenter providers are building renewable energy microgrids, where a datacenter provides the fund-ing and infrastructure to make renewable power available and cost effective where it wouldn’t otherwise be.

• Turning waste into power. Some interest-ing (and rare!) examples include powering datacenters from the waste of other pro-cesses/systems, like generators fueled by bio-fuel waste (methane from landfills, plant waste, wood chips, etc.).

• New datacenter materials. Datacenters are being built from timber that sequesters carbon, rather than causing large greenhouse gas emis-sions from concrete production. Timber can be reclaimed at end of life.

• Managing equipment life cycles to reduce the amount of new equipment manufactured. Most Life Cycle Analyses (LCAs) of DC IT gear show that 50-70% of the life-cycle energy of the product is used in manufacture, before the user even turns the equipment on. This “embedded energy” can’t be recovered at end of life because it isn’t actually in the product. It was spent manu-facturing chips, printed circuit boards, hard drives, etc. In addition, IT hardware contains hyper-pure, rare earth, and critical materials in substantially greater concentrations than is present in most ores, but these bits are very difficult to isolate and recover at end of life. Even if we dump e-waste into the ore smelters, we are starting back almost at zero from an energy perspective. This under-scores that given current recycling processes, the best way to reduce the impact of IT equipment is to use it longer.

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• Include Circular Economy principles as your organization designs or purchases/leases datacenter resources. Think about what the facility was before, and what it could be in the future.

• Think about the feasibility of re-using waste heat such as District Heating. If you aren’t able to build/operate your datacenters in this way, could you move more workloads to areas that can?

• Develop a long-term IT asset management strategy that embraces Circular Economy principles. Think about modular designs and infrastructure that extend the life of the system and don’t require a server to be decommissioned when the processor is 6 months old. Develop the ability to cascade equipment throughout your environment. Purchase secondary market when you can.

• Buy from equipment suppliers that design with extended life cycles in mind and offer repair capabilities up to 10 years. Use partners with a mindset for equipment recycling that is in line with your sustainability standards.

• Consider areas where you could use previous generation gear, or partner with a provider that uses older gear. After it no longer makes sense for your organization to keep IT gear installed, work with a decommissioning and recycling partner with similar sustainability goals.

• Develop a shared ethos within your organization to shift the mindset from “new is better” to “how can we work together to fulfill our sustainability goals?” Include Circular Economy discussions across your organization and consider establishing KPIs that motivate more attention and commitment to these practices. Reward members of your organization who think “outside the box” and experiment with new ways to put Circular Economy principles into action.

• Evaluate the costs and value of re-using materials and infrastructure. Sustainability objectives and business objectives aren’t always diametrically opposed! In many cases, the case for “green” datacenters may yield more profits and value.

NEXT STEPS

Jennifer Cooke Research Director, IDC

Ali Fenn, Chief Innovation Office IT Renew

Antti-Jussi Laine, Senior Consultant | Critical Facilities, Granlund Oy

Jeff Omelchuck, Executive Director, Infrastructure Masons

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