- Microsoft says it is a year before its objective of reuse and recycling of its server
- The extraction of rare land minerals and metals has demonstrated a key
- Circular centers reuse dismantling hardware
Microsoft says that it is ahead of Target in its search to become a zero waste company, one of the key aspects of its sustainability goal, but it is not yet there.
In a blog post, Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure CVP Rani Borkar confirmed that the company has 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 to Microsoft, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, one more step of being negative of carbon, positive in water and positive terrain by 2030.
Microsoft data centers are almost free of waste
Borkar explained that the company had exceeded its objective piloting the sustainable extraction of HDD HDD minerals and metals, reducing the need for new materials such as neodymium, gold and copper.
The extraction process implies the dissolution without crushed HDD acid, which is said to offer a high performance recovery rate of 90%.
The company also boasted a 95% reduction in emissions compared to traditional mining and processing practices, highlighting the recycling of broader cross category effects can have to help Microsoft achieve more than one of its sustainability objectives.
Microsoft has also continued to expand its circular centers worldwide with the aim of processing and enrupted stressful servers and components dismantled in their upcoming useful lives: things that academies that train the technicians of the data centers.
Its first circular center, located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, opened in 2020. Five more in the United States, Ireland and Singapore have followed since then, and the company has already developed plans for new sites in Cardiff, Wales; New South Wales, Australia and San Antonio, Texas.
The third change that has allowed Microsoft to reach that important rate of 90.9% one year before was the introduction of recyclable packaging solutions to transport hardware of the data center to allow easier sidewalk recycling.
Borkar states that more than 30,000 server racks have been prosecuted through the Microsoft global containers recycling program, diverting more than 2,500 metric tons of waste waste.
That said, every step taken in the right direction is apparently encountered. Microsoft’s 2024 sustainability report details how greenhouse gas emissions and electricity consumption have been uploading annually since at least 2020, indicative of the colossal impact of the powerful intelligence and computing data centers in the cloud.
