- Microsoft says that it is a year earlier to reuse a server and recycling
- The extraction of minerals and rare land metals has proven the key
- The circular centers reuse the decarmed equipment
Microsoft says he is ahead of Target in his quest to become a zero waste company – one of the key aspects of his objective of sustainability – but he is not yet there.
In a blog article, Azure material systems and the CVP Rani Borkar infrastructure confirmed that the company had now reached a reuse and recycling rate of 90.9% for servers and components from 2024, slightly exceeding its 2025 target of 90% and arriving there a year earlier.
The milestone brings Microsoft closer, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, one more step towards negative carbon, positive water and the landing point of view by 2030.
Microsoft’s data centers are almost without waste
Borkar explained that the company had exceeded its objective by piloting the sustainable extraction of minerals and metals of rare land on the scale of hard drives on scale, reducing the need for new materials such as neodymium, gold and copper.
The extraction process implies the dissolution without acid of grated hard drives, supposed to offer a 90%high -efficiency recovery rate.
The company also boasted of a 95% reduction in emissions compared to traditional mining and treatment practices, highlighting the recycling of wider transformations effects can have to help Microsoft achieve more than one of its durability objectives.
Microsoft has also continued to extend its circular centers worldwide in order to treat and complete servers and material components who died on their next useful life – academies that form data center technicians.
Its first circular center, located in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, opened in 2020. Five others across the United States, Ireland and Singapore have followed since then, and the company has already developed plans for new sites in Cardiff, in Wales; New South Wales, Australia and San Antonio, Texas.
The third change which allowed Microsoft to reach this rate of 90.9% very significant one year earlier was the introduction of recyclable packaging solutions to transport the data from the data center to allow easier street recycling.
Borkar claims that more than 30,000 servers racks have been treated via the global packaging recycling program of Microsoft, diverting more than 2,500 metric tonnes of waste from landfills.
That said, each step taken in the right direction is apparently encountered with a step back. The report on the durability of Microsoft 2024 details how greenhouse gas emissions and electricity consumption have increased each year since at least 2020, indicating the colossal impact of powerful cloud computing and artificial intelligence centers.
