CyrusOne boosts e-waste recycling with AIT

CyrusOne has ramped up its e-waste recycling with a new partnership that will encourage our customers and employees to begin properly recycling unusable electronics at our data centers.

We have inked a deal with AIT Electronic Recycling Solutions, which will administer comprehensive electronic recycling and data destruction at all U.S. facilities and install collection bins to properly recycle end-of-life electronic equipment. The goal is to make it easy for participants to properly dispose of e-waste in an environmentally conscious way.

We will officially launch the program with clean-up initiatives encouraging customers to weed out e-waste for recycling. To promote the benefits of recycling e-waste, we will host regional lunches with customers and employees at our facilities in Sterling (Northern Virginia), Chicago, Phoenix, and San Antonio.

Each data center will have five boxes: one deployed with a box label and four stacked together in loading dock areas. CyrusOne operations will coordinate and manage the e-waste recycling boxes.

Customers and employees can recycle any electronics from their homes, such as old printers, monitors, keyboards and computer towers, or any e-waste from our data centers, such as cabling (coax, copper and fiber), server hardware, rack rails and hard drives. Notably, if a customer wants to recycle hard drives, they should follow their company's data destruction policies prior to placing them in the recycle box. Once the hardware is placed in the box and recycled, CyrusOne will have no way of providing them documentation specific to their hardware. However, since CyrusOne will ultimately receive the certificate of destruction, all CyrusOne hard drives will have the appropriate documentation.

The only electronics not recyclable in our program are TVs, lightbulbs, and white goods, such as refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines and kitchen appliances.

Once boxes are full, customers and employees will move the full boxes to the loading dock area and replace it with an empty box. Then they will follow the instructions on the SOP document to coordinate pick up. The contact information is also provided on the box label.

AIT will then send CyrusOne a monthly certificate of destruction summary, by building, to account for all recycled items. If a customer wants to recycle their hardware and must have a certificate of destruction, they can contact AIT directly to coordinate a direct pickup of their assets, which will include applicable fees and a certificate of destruction.

AIT will also provide box labels to each site's contact.

The new e-waste recycling program with AIT is part of CyrusOne's ongoing sustainability mission, which we detail in our new 2022 Sustainability Report.

"Our new program with AIT Electronic Recycling Solutions is a great next step in CyrusOne's ongoing commitments to the environment and the community," said Dan Moore, Operations Business Director at CyrusOne. "Electronic recycling is incredibly beneficial to both data center facilities and the environment by reusing valuable materials and keeping toxins out of the environment. Environmental, social and corporate responsibility are embedded in our business practice, and at CyrusOne we do everything we can to protect our planet."