Having an extensive environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policy in place has quickly become the norm for companies of every size. Customers, employees, and other stakeholders are clamoring to hear how the brands they interact with are enacting responsible business practices that better the world around them. Given this environment, communicating a clear focus on ESG initiatives has become imperative.
More than 90% of S&P 500 companies make ESG information publicly available.
In this piece, we will provide a brief overview of ESG and detail how Regency’s IT asset disposition (ITAD) service offerings can contribute to your company’s efforts to incorporate environmental, social, and governance policies throughout your business.
What Is ESG?
Let’s break ESG down letter by letter to help better understand exactly what it’s all about.
The E stands for environmental and is the most well understood leg of the ESG stool. Over the last two decades, environmental concerns have pushed their way to the front of the world’s collective conscience as society butts up against thorny issues such as climate change, extreme weather, and natural resource shortages. The environmental section is where companies seek to enact meaningful policies around topics such as pollution avoidance, carbon emissions reductions, and responsible use of resources and materials.
Next comes the S for social, perhaps the most expansive category of ESG. Viewed with the widest lens, social concerns include all of the ways in which your company interacts with people. Key groups with whom these interactions occur include employees, customers, and neighbors or residents of the communities in which a business operates. When examining a company’s social practices, outside parties will often look for formal policies covering items like workplace safety, responsible sourcing of materials, community involvement, and personal data protection.
Finally comes the G for governance, which relates to the internal structure and standards of your company. Corporate policies such as ethics, codes of conduct, and board composition fall under this umbrella, as do financial or operational initiatives like executive compensation and risk management. Boards of directors, executives, and other top managers are often the most public facing representatives of a company. Given that fact, investors and other third parties take a keen interest in seeing that these individuals and committees are operating according to a principled set of standards that will help to protect the organization from scandal or other negative publicity.
ITAD’s Place in ESG Policy
IT asset disposition (ITAD) refers to a suite of services for handling all manner of a company’s electronic and electrical equipment once that equipment has reached its end-of-life or end-of-use by that company. These services cover a timeline from the moment an organization determines that it has finished using an asset all the way through that asset’s final disposition via redeployment, reuse, resale, parts harvesting, or recycling.
Given ITAD’s connections to hot button issues such as data protection, sustainable resource management, and recycling, its ties to ESG policies should be obvious. Partnering with a comprehensive and well-respected ITAD provider such as Regency Technologies has been proven to contribute to the achievement of goals across all three letters of your company’s ESG plan.
ITAD’s adherence to the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle provides a clear linkage to the environmental portion of ESG. Service from a provider such as Regency improves a company’s environmental outcomes in a variety of ways. Efficient transportation of end-of-use equipment trims an organization’s scope 3 emissions. Reuse of electronic equipment through redeployment or resale lessens energy and resource use through reduced needs for manufacturing of new goods. Even when IT assets have reached the end of their useful life and require recycling, their constituent components and materials are recovered and reintroduced into manufacturing processes, providing some curtailment of the need for harmful and energy-intensive mining of Earth’s natural resources.
On the social side, effective ITAD service includes standards-backed data protection services that ensure the private information of your company’s employees, customers, and others remains just that – private. One need only ask Morgan Stanley the financial and reputational cost of failing to use a vetted ITAD provider. Regency maintains certification to widely recognized industry standards that ensure proper data protection practices, and we provide Certificates of Destruction attesting to the proper handling of all data-bearing assets that go through our ITAD process.
Furthermore, the mining reductions inherent in recycling electronics support responsible supply chain management, as many of the natural resources required to build electronics are sourced from the developing world where labor standards and other business practices can be lacking. Many ITAD companies, including Regency, also offer options to direct your organization’s equipment that remains usable to those who lack the computer equipment required to participate fully in our increasingly digital society.
Proper ITAD service also provides benefits to your organization’s governance policies that aim to ensure that company directors and executives play by the rules while most effectively fulfilling their financial duty to maximize profit for shareholders. Regency and other reputable ITAD providers offer return in multiple forms – one being the peace of mind that your company’s assets are handled responsibly and sustainably, and another a share of the financial return from the residual value of those assets. These aspects of ITAD can combine with effective internal governance policies to ensure that this residual value of IT assets is returned to a company and its shareholders, rather than being embarrassingly misappropriated or squandered through improper disposal of equipment.
Start Leveraging ITAD to Support Your ESG Goals Today
Regency serves businesses and organizations of all industries, types, and sizes. If you want to begin reaping the ESG and other benefits that an experienced and reputable ITAD company provides, reach out to Joe LaChance at [email protected] or use our Contact form to get in touch today.