Every year, millions of computers end their useful life somewhere.
Some are reborn as refurbished mobiles, others travel to distant landfills and a few end up for sale on the Internet with all their data inside.
That last option has already cost Morgan Stanley more than $163 million. And it is just the hole that blockchain technology is starting to close within the ITAD sector.
The story of how blockchain can shield e-waste
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Before getting into the subject, it is worth clarifying what we are talking about when we mention blockchain, that word that many associate only with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
In reality, it is something much simpler and at the same time more powerful: a digital record book shared between several parties, where each entry is stamped with a cryptographic fingerprint that is impossible to alter without the entire system detecting it. It works like a chain of linked blocks, in which modifying a single one would force you to rewrite all the following ones in each copy distributed around the world.
That is why it is so useful for certifying trajectories, properties and processes where trust between participants is fragile or non-existent.
And here it fits the ITAD like a glove.
When an old laptop goes through six different hands before it ends up refurbished or recycled, someone has to guarantee that none of those hands changed the dates, forged a certificate or took information along the way.
Blockchain does just that: it turns every step of the journey into a permanent footprint, verifiable by anyone and resistant to manipulation.
What for years was an act of faith between suppliers is transformed into a mathematical proof.
Why is it important to control traceability?
The story seems to be taken from a series of intrigue, but it really happened. In 2016, Morgan Stanley decommissioned two data centers.
To save a little over a hundred thousand dollars, he hired a moving company with no experience in managing computer equipment.
That company subcontracted to another. That other one resold the hard drives in online auctions without deleting them. An anonymous buyer came across personal data of the bank’s customers and raised the alarm.
Fifteen million people affected. Fines from the U.S. Treasury, sanction from the SEC and a class action lawsuit later, the bank had paid a monumental bill for something as seemingly boring as throwing away some old servers.
Understanding the world of ITAD
Welcome to the world of ITAD, which stands for IT Asset Disposition. It’s the last mile of the technology lifecycle.
When a company renews its employees’ laptops, retires a server or closes an office, all those gadgets have to go somewhere.
Someone must collect them, transport them, thoroughly erase them, decide whether to refurbish or destroy them, recover valuable materials such as copper, gold, and rare earths, and issue a certificate saying that everything was done according to the rules.
A long process, with many hands involved, where a loose link is enough for chaos to appear.
A Colossal New Order in Waste
The problem is not small. According to the latest United Nations Global E-waste Monitor, the world generated 62 million tons of e-waste in 2022 alone.
The figure is hard to imagine, but here’s a useful picture: it would take one and a half million forty-ton trucks in single file to transport it, enough to circle the entire planet at the equator.
Of all that mountain, only 22 percent was recycled in a documented way. Spain is not left out. Each inhabitant generates on average almost twenty kilos of electronic waste per year, and it is estimated that by 2030 the country will accumulate more than 800,000 tonnes of devices sold before 2024 alone.
Here comes the uncomfortable question. If you hand over your old laptop to the company, who can guarantee that your emails, photos, saved passwords and bank details don’t end up in some dark corner of the Internet?
Until recently, the answer was an Excel sheet, a signed PDF, and a vendor’s word. Documents like this can be forged. Dates can be changed. Certificates can be invented.
That’s exactly what the SEC found in the New York bank’s case: The certificates of destruction it had on file were dead letter.
The blockchain enters right through that crack.
It works like a shared ledger between all participants, where each movement is signed with a cryptographic fingerprint that no one can modify later. Imagine a magic notebook where every time someone touches your old laptop, it is written in ink invisible to the manipulators: the collection in your office, the truck that transported it, the warehouse where it slept, the technician who erased the disk, the plant that destroyed it or the buyer who gave it a second life. Every step, sealed and verifiable. If someone tries to change something after the fact, the whole system gives it away.
This is already happening, it’s not science fiction.
The OBADA foundation, a coalition with more than a hundred companies in the ITAD sector worldwide, has been developing an open protocol since 2017 that assigns each team a unique identifier anchored in blockchain.
They work closely with ISO to make it an international standard. In Spain, Telefónica Tech and the company Éxxita Be Circular launched in 2022 the so-called European Green Passport, a QR code attached to each recovered device that gives access to its complete history: how many times it was repaired, what parts were changed, what carbon footprint it saved.
They already apply it to the more than 500,000 pieces of equipment that Éxxita processes each year. Other names in the ecosystem include the Dutch Circularise, which gives digital passports to clients such as Porsche, and Iron Mountain, a global giant that with its Teraware platform issues serialized certificates that are impossible to duplicate for large banks and data center operators.
The connection with the circular economy is direct, almost obvious. Without reliable traceability, no one wants to buy refurbished equipment.
Without unforgeable certificates, no compliance department in a hospital, bank, or ministry approves donating material instead of destroying it.
When all that is resolved, the numbers change.
HPE’s finance division boasts of remarketing 89 percent of the equipment it receives; only 0.4 percent ends up as real electronic waste. That’s the difference between throwing value in the trash and returning it to the circuit.
From 2027, moreover, it will no longer be an elegant option for companies with a good image.
The European Union approved the Digital Product Passport, which will be implemented in stages in batteries, electronics and other sectors until 2030. Without him, selling in the European market will be quite complicated. The question then ceases to be whether blockchain will enter ITAD, and becomes how long it takes to become the invisible standard that we all take for granted.
In short, ITAD is that unglamorous corner where it is decided whether our technology ends up polluting, leaking data or being reborn. Blockchain is bringing to this profession something that has been missing for decades: an inviolable black box that records every step of the journey. Cases such as Telefónica’s Green Passport or the OBADA network show that the technological circular economy already has the infrastructure to be transparent, profitable and auditable. What seemed like bureaucracy is becoming, without noise, a silent revolution.
References
Éxxita be circular. (2022, April 7). Éxxita Be Circular and Telefónica Tech create the European Green Passport for electronic equipment certified with blockchain. https://exxita.com/2022/04/07/exxita-be-circular-y-telefonica-tech-crean-el-pasaporte-verde-europeo-para-equipos-electronicos-certificado-con-blockchain/
Grand View Research. (2024). IT asset disposition market size, share & trends analysis report, 2024-2030. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/it-asset-disposition-market
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2022, September 20). SEC charges Morgan Stanley Smith Barney with extensive failures to safeguard personal information of millions of customers [Press Release]. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-168
International Telecommunication Union, & United Nations Institute for Training and Research. (2024). The Global E-waste Monitor 2024. ITU & UNITAR. https://ewastemonitor.info/the-global-e-waste-monitor-2024/
