IT Link recycles its electronic equipment with Zack

MEETING BETWEEN NOËL MOISAN, CIO OF THE IT LINK GROUP AND RODOLPHE HUARD, DEVELOPMENT MANAGER AT ZACK

Can you tell us about your business in a few words?

Rudolphe : Zack is a circular economy company. We fight against the waste of electronic products by maximizing the reuse of business computer equipment through sales, charitable donations and recycling. Our goal is to have an environmental and social impact!
xmas : IT Link is a digital services company specializing in connected systems. We support our customers in their innovation and transformation projects, from sensors to business applications.

Tell us about the genesis of this collaboration?

Rudolphe : During my former activity, I was already collaborating with Noël on another field. When I joined Zack, I simply got back in touch with him when I saw that IT Link was looking to reduce its environmental impact.
xmas : Indeed, the social and environmental impact of our activities is at the heart of our concern, especially at the IT department where we manage large volumes of equipment; so when Rodolphe contacted me again as part of his new activities at Zack, it was quite natural that we collaborated.

What challenges do you face today for the recycling of computer equipment?

Rudolphe : As a committed player in reuse, our main challenge is to raise awareness among IT managers to offer the best possible second life to their IT equipment. Indeed, the default solution is still sometimes to entrust everything to a simple recycler who does not bother to sort the devices that could still be used or repaired...
I also note that it is important to do pedagogy because many devices are unfortunately considered “to be recycled” after only 3-5 years by IT teams when they could still be used very well for up to 7-8 years without problem. The main constraint is often the lack of performance, but this does not prevent, for example, from giving this material to associations. I also like to inform you that as nearly 80% of the environmental impact is linked to the manufacture of devices, it is crucial to extend their lifespan as much as possible to compensate for the initial footprint.
If today some businesses have not yet launched, it is more due to a lack of information than a lack of desire, especially when habits are already established. Many of our customers had sometimes already recycled their equipment for many years but without having visibility on what was becoming of their equipment. The CSR report that we provide them precisely allows them to monitor and measure the positive impact.
xmas : We have a relatively large computer park within the IT department, and the quantities of discarded hardware are increasing. Until now, we've been scrapping through recyclers who destroy materials to only recover the raw material, which posed two problems for us. First, we had a feeling of waste, because we thought that some hardware that was no longer usable for IT Link could be used for other purposes, and second, in order to ensure safe disposal, we had to extract the hard drives and destroy them through another channel.
When Rodolphe presented Zack's business to us and demonstrated his ability to give a second life to equipment in a secure way to either resell them or donate them to associations, we thought it was a relevant and rewarding way to end the life of our equipment.

Following the crisis we are experiencing, have you observed any changes in behavior?

Rudolphe : For more than a year at Zack, we have been dealing with two phenomena. The first is the growing desire of businesses to reduce their environmental footprint while being able to measure it. I note that there are often employees with a lot of good will who are environmentally and socially involved in their private lives and would like to play a role for their companies. They are usually the ones who push lots of great projects internally.
The second phenomenon is a profound change in uses, a direct consequence of Covid, which is the generalization of teleworking. As a result, many companies had to equip themselves with a mobile fleet (laptops, smartphones, etc.) and wanted to get rid of their fixed devices (central units, screens, IP telephony, etc.). As a result, many companies contacted us because they simply did not want to throw away this equipment, which was often relatively recent but no longer suited to their current needs.
xmas : To build on what Rodolphe has just explained, in the case of IT Link, we have noticed for several years, through the press or even the expectations of some of our customers, that controlling the environmental impact of businesses was a fundamental subject to take into account in our activities and on which we are now sometimes evaluated. Even if at IT Link, we have always been attentive to this subject, the crisis has brought out new players and helped some companies like ours to take concrete steps in new ways.
The emergence of teleworking did not lead us to renew our fleet because we already provided almost exclusively mobile equipment in view of the mobility of our users. However, through the combination of these two phenomena, and the possibility of valorization with Zack, we recently removed from our stock the last fixed equipment that we kept “just in case”.

What are your respective ambitions for the future?

Rudolphe : Have as much impact as possible! We had a very good year 2021 on the BtoB side and it is nice to see that more and more companies want to have a positive impact.
Following several discussions with my customers, we even expanded our offer by offering “employee collections”. The principle is simple, allow all employees to bring back to the company all the IT devices that are unnecessarily lying around in their closets to give them a second life thanks to Zack. This initiative is often very appreciated because it allows company employees to be aware and involved in the issue of electronic waste.
xmas : Within the IT Link IT Department, we have the primary intention of making the computer park live in a sustainable way, we are really not in a consumerist approach. We want to make the most of our IT infrastructures and hardware, we often take them further than simple accounting amortization in terms of lifespan.
In addition, we optimize the use of our internal servers by deploying services in the form of virtual machines, and we are increasingly tending towards the deployment of infrastructures in the cloud, knowing that the operators we address are themselves committed to a CSR approach.
We could go further by studying the detailed consumption of all our infrastructures as well as our products, which is what we are interested in today.
The EcoVadis certification allowed us to establish a state of the art of our structure and our actions in 2021, and is now a roadmap for future progress.

What would be your message to businesses that don't dare to start with Zack?

Rudolphe : Don't throw away! Materials can have a second life and let's maximize reuse together!
xmas : Implement a process for the secure and rewarding valuation of your equipment, for the company, and benefit from a real gain of time for the IT teams!