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CEDaCI – Interreg

The data center industry is concentrated in North West Europe (NWE), especially Germany, France, the Netherlands, and also the UK. Datacenter equipment is renewed every 1-5 years. This contributes in part to the generation of 11.8 Mt/year of e-waste (high growth waste in the EU). E-waste contains Critical Raw Materials that are technically and economically important but vulnerable to market fluctuations and at the end of its life, it is usually exported or sent to landfills.

The CEDaCI project aims to facilitate the integration of a circular economy for the data center industry, and more specifically for critical raw materials in North West Europe, increase their reuse, extend their life by reusing equipment, reduce the use of virgin materials, reduce the waste and environmental impacts of equipment and develop a sustainable and secure economy for the supply chain sector of these critical raw materials.

Only 10% of critical raw materials are recycled and recovered per year. This rate will increase at the end of the project to between 19% and 24% within 5 to 10 years.

About the project

All stakeholders will be brought together (manufacturers, operators, recyclers, etc.) through a co-creation (knowledge sharing) platform and three pilots to produce: eight products, processes, and technologies developed and tested in real-world conditions; a decision-making tool for all Data Center sub-sectors to optimize circular economy business models; recycling and recovery strategies for WEEE and Critical Raw Materials. These will feed into: a long-term strategy including end-of-project delivery and 10-year maintenance plans; tailored technical assistance (training sessions) for 50 companies in the sector; advice and guidance for decision-makers and a demonstrator that will explain the context, processes, and benefits of the circular economy for the project to be sustained in the long term.

Partners of this project

Duration and funding

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Our contribution to the project

Notably, we are in charge of the recycling issue in connection with Team² and Terra Nova Development (TND), mainly through the realization of Life Cycle Assessment of the existing and scenarios.

Thus, we are setting up data inventories for the recycling and reuse processes. These inventories will feed into a decision support tool for the circular economy of data centers.

The situational analysis report introduces the state of the art for the circular economy in the Data Centre Industry (DCI). The report provides for the first time extended characterisation results of DC including the material composition of network equipment (specifically servers and switches). Based on these results a screening Life Cycle Assessment LCA is conducted highlighting the environmental performance to provide recommendations for ecodesign.

Click here to download the Situational Analysis Report.

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