AWS extends life of datacentre hardware via Dublin reverse logistics plant

Greater circular economy vital for net-zero ambitions

Amazon has announced the expansion of its circular economy programme by partnering with re:Cycle Reverse Logistics in Dublin to extend the life of hardware that has come to the end of its time at AWS datacentres – at least for now.

The Dublin plant extends the life of data centre hardware and other electronics by refurbishing and reusing them. It is part of a much larger AWS push to consolidate, test, repair, and recirculate functional equipment back into AWS’s inventory or to third parties to be sold for reuse.

Reverse logistics partners enable AWS to optimise component reuse across its data centres, taking decommissioned equipment from one facility and redeploying it to serve demand elsewhere.

Reuse within AWS data centres is prioritised before selling to third parties. If equipment cannot be reused by AWS or sold on the second-hand market, then precious metals and critical raw materials are recovered and sent for high end recycling.

Lots of new datacentres have been announced in the UK recently, including by AWS, which is investing £8 billion in UK datacentres over the next five years. These datacentres will have a significant environmental impact, mainly due to the energy and water they will consume.

However, one way of reducing longer-term emissions is to reuse and recycle components like processors and memory chips. The savings are generated by the fact that fewer new components need to be manufactured saving raw materials and energy.

The Dublin facility involves specialised trolleys, powered by robots which move up to two tonnes of equipment along, while bespoke machines and processes are leveraged to enable the reuse of used equipment and components and the recovery of precious metals, found in the heart of circuit boards and computer components.

The reuse and recovery of high value materials and components is a core part of the AWS reverse logistics programme, and these facilities support AWS’s data centre operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

AWS has been curiously reluctant to share data about its circular economy initiatives since Computing has been conducting cloud sustainability research. However, the company is starting to share some metrics such as the fact that ss a direct result of AWS’s reverse logistics programme in 2023, 14.6 million hardware components globally were diverted from landfills by being recycled or sold into the second-hand market for reuse.

In its environmental reporting, Amazon said that approximately 379,000 components were routed back into AWS inventory for reuse in datacentres in 2023. That is a tiny proportion of overall inventory so it will be interesting to see how this expansion of this reverse logistics programme increases this number.