ABN AMRO's scrapheap

You won’t find any stickers on them to prove it, but every new Dell laptop and monitor given to ABN AMRO employees all over the world has been awarded an ecolabel: the TCO certificate. TCO stands for Tjänstemännen Central Organisation, which is Swedish for Central Organisation of Professionals.

Under what conditions are ABN AMRO laptops and monitors made?

TCO issues certificates for digital equipment that satisfy a whole range of health and safety requirements. For example, they mustn’t emit too much noise. The production process is also scrutinised. How polluting is it? Are materials recycled wherever possible? How good are the working conditions of the people who make them? Is child labour involved?

“In each new period, TCO makes the certification requirements a little stricter,” Linda Bosboom of ABN AMRO’s IT Workplace Solutions explains. “They recognise that companies can’t produce 100% responsibly overnight, and need to be given the time and scope to improve. That's why TCO’s approach really appeals to us, because it’s how we treat our own customers.”

In about four years’ time, every ABN AMRO employee will be working on a TCO-certified laptop and monitor.

What happens to the old equipment?

So what happens when after a couple of years an employee wants to exchange their trusty, responsibly produced laptop for a new one? “We’ve agreed with our suppliers that we can hand back our old laptops,” says Belinda Schouten of IT Digital Workplace. “They break them down in a responsible way so that the constituent materials can be re-used.”

“We also donate a large proportion of our old laptops to the ABN AMRO Foundation,” Belinda continues, “to give to children and schools that can’t afford equipment of their own. Plus there are always employees who are keen to buy second-hand laptops for their own use. While this is reassuring, it does mean the bank loses sight of what happens to all those old laptops. We don’t know whether they’ll be responsibly broken down and recycled when they reach the end of their lives.”

With each new laptop the scrapheap shrinks

This has led ABN AMRO to forge a partnership with Closing the Loop, an organisation committed to “zero waste ICT”, which means not a single IT device should end up in the waste dump. For each laptop it buys ABN AMRO pays Closing the Loop a fee to safely process and recycle the huge mountains of discarded electronic waste in Africa. Each laptop the bank invests in here therefore gradually reduces the digital scrapheap there.

But isn't that simply buying off your sense of guilt? Like compensating for the CO2 emissionsgenerated by a flight to London? “No,” answers Wiebren van der Zee of IT Platforms & Technology. “The fee we pay is the first price tag we’ve ever attached to something whose cost has never been counted before. It’s enough to raise everyone's awareness of the environmental effects of purchasing and disposing of our equipment. And it also means they’ll know they’re helping to reduce the electronic waste mountain.”

So far, ABN AMRO has offset the purchase of over 9,000 laptops in this way.

Not watching, but acting

“There's no doubt,” Linda concludes, “that our Western lifestyle has done a lot of damage to the planet. But at least by taking part in this initiative, I feel I’m not simply watching, but doing something about it.”