SCC has revealed ambitions to quadruple the number of devices it processes at its new recycling facility in response to heightened market demand.
Rising end-user appetite for circular IT has prompted several of Europe’s largest resellers to invest heavily in their own recycling and reuse facilities.
Now, SCC has broken cover on its plans, telling IT Channel Oxygen it is betting big on device-as-a-service to bolster the volume of kit it takes back.
SCC circular ambitions take shape
Launched in January, SCC’s new, purpose-built ‘Recyclea’ WEEE processing facility has the capacity to process one million devices annually.
“The intention is to scale up and improve how we process devices,” SCC’s Head of Sustainabilitiy, Alex Groves, told IT Channel Oxygen for our Second Life campaign.
“At the moment, we’re at about 200,000 devices through there, and it’s about 50-50 for recycled vs refurbished. Obviously we’ve got to improve that ratio and the volumes.”
The intention is to “quadruple” throughput, Groves said.
That ambition reflects expectations that SCC will take back higher levels of devices from its customers following the launch of a new as-a-service partnership with asset finance outfit Lombard.
“We’ll process the devices we lease out and then get back, so there’s an expectatation there will be higher throughput through that. The Lombard partnership alone should double the volume,” Groves said.
“Obviously, we’ll try and take back devices from customers when we’re doing refreshes, and that’s normally the expectation. But we’re not ready to make one of those 1:1 targets at the moment.”
Customer clamour
Heightened visibility of ESG at a boardroom level means circular IT is “becoming increasingly important” to customers, SCC rival Computacenter told us last month as it opened up on why it has set a 1:1 device recovery goal.
Similarly, Advania’s recent opening of a new Swedish centre with the capacity to refurbish up to one million devices came in response to “long-standing demand” from its clients, the Nordic reseller said.
Groves concurred, saying Birmingham-based SCC’s decision to invest £6m in Recyclea is a recognition of where the market is moving.
“We’re seeing the market moving towards it, and there’s also our own ESG strategy as well,” Groves said, referencing the fact that SCC’s parent company recently brought forward its net zero goal to 2040.
“We have a large French business, and we’ve seen the mandate in France come in for 20% refurbished in the public sector – and Ireland has just done something similar. You’d expect with the moves that have been made by the new [UK] government, this kind of thing could be coming soon,” he said.
SCC – which ranked 6th in IT Channel Oxygen’s recent Oxygen 250 – is developing its services proposition to offer customers more insight into how devices are performing for their users, SCC Solutions Architect Jonathan Sing added.
“If this kind of requirement came into the UK [on 20% device reuse] and our customers come to us and say ‘where do we deploy these devices? Which users are they suitable for? How do we know they’re up to the job? etc’, that’s where our service wrap comes in,” Sing told IT Channel Oxygen.
“We can provide them with that intelligence and insight to say ‘we’ve done the persona modelling to identify those users and their minimum requirements, and monitor the device’s performance’. So when it comes to implementing greater deployment of second-life devices, we can help them do that via that targeted data.”
“We would like to help our customers move away from that fixed-term lifecycle of a device refresh every four years to a more dymamic approach,” Sing added.
“So identifying the devices that are performing badly and refreshing those devices, but keeping the devices that are still performing well.”
Receptive to remanufactured
Remanufactured devices from the likes of Circular Computing are beginning to gain traction in the market, with rumours growing that vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo could bring out their own flavours of remanufactured soon. These are devices that are restored to a higher-spec than their refurbished counterparts, and come with a warranty.
Although SCC does not currently offer remanufactured, Groves indicated this could change soon.
“We want to expand out into accessing whatever devices are available. I think there’s a market for all of it,” Groves said.
“It’s that horses for courses scenario, which is what we were talking about in terms of persona mapping.”
Although SCC is one of the few UK resellers, alongside the likes of Computacenter, Stone and Centerprise, to operate its own recycling arm, it doesn’t have all the answers, Groves acknowledged.
“When it comes to the devices we put into our customers, we need to access every device that’s available. So we’ll want to expand out, talk to the distributors that are engaging with the vendors on their renew and recertify programmes and people like Circular Computing and others who can provide that high-level remanufactured device – we just need all of it.
“And through those kinds of partnerships we can see where we need to improve in terms of our processes, and what’s practical for us to do ourselves, and what’s not.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
