CEDaCI – L’économie circulaire pour les centres de données

CEDaCI : Le projet européen pour l’économie circulaire de l’industrie des centres de données

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What is the CEDaCI project?

CEDaCI (Circular Economy for Data Center Industry) is a project funded by the European Interreg program that started in 2017 and will end in September 2023. It aims to make the data centre industry (DCI) more circular by eco-designing servers, extending their lifespan, and increasing the recycling rate and recovered metals. Many value chain actors are involved and networked, manufacturers, academics, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), consultants, and second-hand specialists...

DCI is one of the essential pillars of the current economic and technological development. Traffic is overgrowing, from 1.1 ZB in 2010 to 100 ZB in 2023 and up to 170 ZB in 2025. In Europe, DCI is concentrated in the Northwest, with over 55% of DCs (Dodd et al., 2018, CloudScene, 2018). DC equipment contains over 50 materials, including at least 16 of the 30 critical materials listed by the European Union . Today, servers are used between 1 and 5 years on average, contributing to 11.8 Mt/year of waste electronic and electrical equipment (WEEE). This makes the industry both economically critical and socially and environmentally sensitive.

WeLOOP provides LCA expertise

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What is the role of WeLOOP in the CEDaCI project?

WeLOOP's WeLOOP in the project is to perform the environmental, social, cost and criticality LCA of the servers characterised for the project. At the beginning of the project, no inventory was available that was accurate enough to provide this data. Therefore, eight servers were disassembled entirely, and their electronic boards were analysed. Ten server inventories will be available at the end of the project. The social, criticality and cost methodologies were adapted to address the specific issues of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE). A complex LCA model, fully parameterised (400 parameters in total), has been developed with the project partners and Product Category Rules (PCR), simplifying and standardising the LCA of the different servers on the market. An online tool, the Circular Data Centre Compass (CDCC), was developed by WeLOOP and the London South Bank University from the data produced in the project.

All of this work has enabled the eco-design of a server, notably by facilitating its reconditioning and recycling. This allows us to demonstrate the feasibility of these processes on a large scale and show interest in extending the servers' life span. Finally, a specific recycling process for electronic cards has been developed, allowing the recovery of tantalum and the metals usually recovered (gold, copper, silver, tin, etc.).

L’outil « Circular Data Centre Compass »

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The Compass tool: why and for whom?

• Compare allows you to configure two data centres and obtain an impact comparison. Each data centre can contain x servers with their configuration (CPU, PSU, HDD, RAM...) with different levels of power consumption related to the configuration and with an impact related to the step in which it is located.
• Ecodesign Evaluator provides an estimation of the circularity of a server according to 10 categories (product information, traceability, design and manufacturing). For example, the eco-designed server in the project obtained a circularity score of 80/100.
• End-of-Life compares the impacts of a server according to the different possible life ends between landfill, conventional scenario, CEDaCI recycling and reconditioning.

The international conference LCM2023in September 2023 will be the project's closing event, with the presence of several partners, as well as conferences presenting the project's final results.