Circular IT by Design: Evolving Scope 3 Carbon Measurement Practices
15 December 2025
Partnership and collaboration amplify speed to market, quality of offering, and environmental impact. KA2’s work with both AssetSpire and N2S demonstrates how strategic collaboration in an ecosystem accelerates and optimises sustainable IT practices. Together, we tackle measuring and managing IT emissions, optimise lifecycle management, and drive circular economy outcomes. This works for comprehensive data centre environmental metrics with AssetSpire, as referenced in ‘The Scope 2 Challenge: Building Better Metrics for In-Life Carbon Costs’, and optimal disposal and circular outcomes with N2S.
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol addresses the full lifecycle of IT assets through four distinct phases: From the extraction of raw materials and the manufacture of hardware assets to global transportation, daily energy consumption, and eventual disposal.
What it does not address in detail is the CO₂e impact of downstream processing and the various disposal methods. The numbers are stark: in 2022, the world produced 62 million tonnes of e-waste. By 2030, the Global E-waste Monitor forecasts this figure to rise to 82 million tonnes, making IT a fast-growing driver of both carbon emissions and e-waste. So disposal choices play an increasingly critical role in sustainable IT.
KA2 Approach
We focus on integrating sustainability into the IT lifecycle, sharing knowledge, and enabling informed decisions beyond procurement and operations into disposal. As a result, we have created a hierarchy of disposal options that assesses the carbon overhead of each. In addition, we measure the carbon avoidance resulting directly from best-practice circular disposal options, where circularity is assessed across reuse, recovery, and recycling based on the level of CO₂e avoided.
Outcomes
Organisations achieve tangible results: reduced emissions, lower e-waste, and strengthened circular-economy practices. Knowledge transfer from partners ensures ongoing improvement and innovation in sustainable IT practices.
With enhanced metrics, it becomes possible to align optimal disposal options to business priorities. For example, extending a fixed asset retention period to “replace on failure” and combining that with the harvesting of components on disposal may be optimal for one organisation, whilst writing down the carbon footprint over three years and returning the assets for refurbishment and second use with a lower carbon footprint at a higher residual value may work for another organisation.
The trick is to measure the carbon impact and the avoidance of each and align them with organisational business and sustainability goals. Another example of recycling IT is that the CO2e cost to mine copper from ore is 3.45 kg of CO2e per kg of copper, whilst extracting it from IT uses 0.47 kg of CO2e per kg of copper. This is what we call urban mining. It has a significant positive impact on the sustainability and security of supply. If we go one step further, we know that using acid or thermal leaching to extract common, noble and rare elements from printed circuit boards has a carbon, social and environmental overhead. A bio-leaching process provides a more environmentally advanced solution that uses less carbon and has a lower social impact than traditional thermal or acid processes. Again, measuring the impact on both carbon reduction and avoidance is key to enabling optimal, sustainable, and circular decision-making.
Looking Ahead
Strategic collaboration will remain critical. By combining expertise, technology, and culture, organisations can decarbonise IT effectively while driving broader sustainability initiatives across their operations.
Conclusion
Sustainable IT requires collaboration, commitment, and actionable intelligence.
Explore your IT sustainability journey with KA2. Schedule a short, no-obligation session with our consultants to discuss your IT carbon footprint, lifecycle strategy, or digital sustainability priorities.
