Yesterday saw the launch of another great initiative in Tech City – an IT recycling project, to help East London startups cost-effectively dispose of their computer hardware in environmentally friendly fashion. In our latest guest blog, James Swanston of Carbon Voyage, one of the companies behind the initiative, talks a little bit more about how the initiative came to be, and how it works…

A lot of small and medium enterprises struggle with recycling (Veolia estimates that this issue costs SMEs about £500 million a year); urban freight is also inefficient and causes needless congestion. Congestion in London is actually a multi-billion pound problem, something that everyone experiences, and a lot of this is due to vehicles travelling around empty or part full. A lot of this is because there is very little co-ordination that occurs between people that have similar requirements and thus there are lots of very similar, inefficient journeys all over London.

Against the backdrop of this, we were introduced by TCIO CEO Eric Van Der Kleij to RDC, the world’s biggest IT recycling company, to see whether we could assist them with addressing this need and opening up new opportunities in the SME market for them. RDC is itself a UK success story – it was a startup that was founded in a shed (albeit almost 20 years ago) and now recycles 1.5 million items a year at its main premises, has three Queen’s Awards and operates in 70 countries.

Part of the value add for this was not just about helping a Tech City startup partner with a big company, but also the creation of the first sustainability initiative of Tech City which is very important to us. By chatting to a range of businesses, we found that a lot of SMEs and startups had old computers lying around because they were concerned about how to dispose of them ensuring that they were properly wiped of data. Fortunately we could do this for free. As computers do have some residual value, the service was designed to allow companies to get some money back (admittedly these aren’t massive figures), or donate that money to The Prince’s Trust.

Our bit of the service is part strategy, part technology which is important as we are more focused on B2B than B2C. The service design is based around using green transport companies to pick up the equipment and then use empty and part-filled trucks returning to Essex where the recycling plant is located so there is a minimal carbon footprint (if any). Trucks are empty 30% of the time, particularly when leaving London, so while Braintree in Essex isn’t too far away, it does prove the point that there are always opportunities to move things around at very low prices when you are helping to increase the load for vehicles that weren’t full! By aggregating several computers from each of a number of SMEs, which is a bit of a new take on the collaborative consumption/ sharing economy thing, we can start to generate the right economies of scale to make the proposition feasible.

The upside for us comes in three parts – working with RDC to launch this elsewhere; seeing whether success here can translate into other potential market opportunities; and, most importantly, demonstrating that using collaborative tools can generate massive savings through sharing journey requirements. It also means that it is possible to get transport costs down massively within a supply chain through consolidating what has traditionally been fragmented and thus expensive. And it also helps us achieve the objective of reducing air pollution and congestion through reduced vehicle usage.

If you would like to know more, visit here or email us at rdc [at] carbonvoyage [dot] com. And of course please use this service as a way of recycling your old IT equipment!

James Swanston is founder of Carbon Voyage, a company that helps travellers get from A to B without costing the earth. Prior to that, he served in the Australian and British Armies with service in East Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan (and a few other places).