Improving the environmental impact of our IT equipment

To find out more about our sustainability strategy and the actions we are taking to improve our impact on the environment – visit our Sustainability page.

In February 2020, Gatehouse Bank moved its London headquarters from Mayfair to the Helicon building in the City. The Helicon is one of London’s first developments to combine retail and offices into an environmentally sustainable architectural design; featuring an energy strategy that controls solar energy through the building’s façade to reduce energy consumption.

We wanted to explore ways we could make our office move as sustainable as possible, as part of our wider commitment to improve the environmental and social impact of our operations. A component of our move was the upgrade of multiple IT devices, and the need to dispose of our outdated equipment. With over 290 devices to be disposed of, we identified our unwanted IT as a key opportunity to make a sustainable choice.

To achieve our sustainability goals, we partnered with Reconome, an innovative business that exists to help fundamentally change the way consumers and businesses think about technology.

Reconome works to deliver circular economy solutions to organisations across the UK and were able to provide us with a sustainable framework for managing our Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment (WEEE).

Reconome collected our unwanted IT equipment and tested, wiped and prepared it for reuse or recycle. In donating our unwanted IT devices to Reconome for collection we achieved excellent sustainability gains, diverting a total of 1654.4 kg of IT equipment from landfill.

The reuse of IT equipment presents significant environmental benefits; devices like monitors have a large carbon footprint associated with their production, and through re-use we can avoid these CO 2 emissions. We are pleased to report that 100% of the devices we donated to Reconome were re-used. Many of these went to community schools at discounted rates, with associated positive social benefits for digital literacy and the community.

While recycling is of course a good option, reuse is of greater benefit to the environment – reuse emits less emissions and ensures products are released back into the market faster than recycling.

By donating our unwanted IT, we avoided 74,506 kg of CO 2 e emissions – 43% of the total carbon footprint of the devices. It would take 3,387 trees one year to sequester the same amount of CO 2 [1]. We are committed to ensuring all of our unwanted IT equipment is donated for recycle or re-use.

Thank you to the team at Reconome for calculating and reporting the positive environmental impact we have made together.

[1] Source: Forests, health and climate change — European Environment Agency