by Shane Henson — March 11, 2013—The Green Grid, an authority on resource-efficient information technology and data centers, has launched a new metric to help organizations measure how their electronic equipment is managed once it reaches the end of its current use.
Called the Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE) metric, it is the first universal metric launched by The Green Grid to help end users of information and communications technologies (ICT) measure their success in the responsible management of outdated equipment, says The Green Grid. EDE is a simple metric that helps organizations calculate and measure their progress in improving equipment disposal processes over time.
Discarded Electronics and Electrical Equipment (EEE) entering the waste stream is known globally as e-waste or Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE). Examples of WEEE include computers, TVs, mobile devices, toys and even goods such as refrigerators and stoves, the organization explains. The definition and monitoring of WEEE worldwide has evolved over the last decade, which has prompted The Green Grid to identify the need to combine the expertise of other organizations who define standards and requirements for e-waste management with its own members’ knowledge and understanding of the e-waste management challenges facing the ICT community. The result is the creation of a metric that quantifies how well a corporate consumer of ICT EEE responsibly manages e-waste.
According to The Green Grid, the EDE metric is defined by calculating the percentage, based on unit or product weight, of decommissioned IT EEE at its end-of-current-use (EOCU) or end-of-life (EOL) that is disposed of through known responsible entities. The Green Grid intends for the EDE metric to be used as a way for organizations to measure themselves and improve over time, rather than act as a score to be compared with other entities, it says.
An overview of the new metric is provided in The Green Grids’ recently released whitepaper, Electronics Disposal Efficiency (EDE): An IT Recycling Metric for Enterprises and Data Centers.
