In 2008, after a long career in technology, I switched my focus to sustainability. And the natural focus for me became sustainable electronics. And within that huge umbrella, the topic that attracted me most was electronic waste. At that time the world was just awakening to the horrors of dumping electronic waste. Already ahead of the game, illumynt founder Paul Knight was actively working to establish new markets for used electronics. Now, some 15 years later, environmental sustainability is the burning question of the day, and illumynt is leaning in to be a significant problem solver and solution provider.
It was just a year ago that two old friends, each, like me, veterans with more than 15 years focusing on the end of life of electronics, met to talk about how illumynt (then CNE Direct) could in fact walk the sustainability walk. Knowing that the core value propositions that illumynt brings to the market are themselves in service of environmental sustainability, they understood that they wanted more. They wanted this organization to embody sustainability but didn’t know where to start. At that meeting, our green team was born.
What’s a green team? Essentially a green team is formed to drive sustainability from the bottom up. It works best, of course, when sponsored by the leadership team. We tapped representatives from across the organization and across the globe, representing human resources, compliance, operations, sales, marketing, and data analytics, as well as respective geographies. And together we set about learning.
Sustainability is a vast ocean and the first steps we took were to narrow our focus to what was most important to us. Using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as guidance, we set about identifying which goals were most germane to our business and the areas where we feel we can make the biggest contribution.
We learned about Scope 1, 2, 3 emissions and how to translate the work we do to reuse electronics translates to reduced carbon emissions. We gathered data to establish the base-lines for our own Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Together with SustainServ and our platform-partner, Echonos, we developed the capability to report Scope 3 Emissions Avoided back to our customers through our customer portal.
As we round our first year out as a team, we’re creating our first-ever Sustainability Report and we are working at creating KPI’s that align with the Sustainable Development Goals we’re targeting. Sustainability is a forever journey and we are proud to say we are committed to the trek.
Be sure to read my continuing blog series as I discuss all things related to sustainable electronics.
