Earth Day or not, the carbon conversation is making its way into boardrooms across the tech industry and beyond. 

Even still, things are not as green as they seem. Sure, Amazon can buy all of the renewable energy the planet has to offer, and Google can optimize scheduling of compute tasks in its data centers to run when low-carbon power sources like wind and solar are most plentiful, but these efforts continue to be constrained by barriers in the supply chain and ecosystem.

To solve a problem this big requires collaborative action across sectors and supply chains. Otherwise “no matter how many great efforts are out there, they're going to be drops literally in the proverbial ocean if somebody else comes along and negates that goodness” said Nina Lund, senior leader at Microsoft, during a Earth Day panel hosted by Circular Supply Chain Network.

The need for a transition away from the current throwaway model of consumption that is wasteful, inefficient, and ecologically harmful for a circular economy is urgent if we are to drive seismic, near-term reductions in carbon pollution, according to moderator Deborah Dull, who founded the group.

In a circular economy, waste is designed out, and products are instead looped back into the production system at end of use.

Businesses have traditionally focused on selling the maximum number of products, but by reducing quantity and increasing quality, products last longer and are used by more people, meaning a company’s original investment in materials goes much further. 

And a circular economy isn’t just planet-friendly. It’s a trillion dollar market opportunity. According to research from Accenture, it could create $4.5 trillion in economic growth by 2030 and up to $25 trillion by 2050. At present, the global economy was only 8.6% “circular” in 2020, down from 9.1% two years prior, the Circularity Gap Report 2021 found.

This would not only maximize the life cycle and longevity of hardware in aggregate, but it would present a solution to the world’s fastest-growing waste stream: E-waste. Only 17.4% of 2019’s e-waste was collected and recycled.

No matter how much the data center industry wants to embrace CO2 offsets and transition to renewable energy and “go green,” vendors continue to manufacture brand-new equipment all the time. 

 “If we're able to take racks, re-certify them, sell them as fully integrated rack-scale solutions to second life users, to third life users, and defer the equivalent amount of new manufacturing, we can tie it to people's carbon goals, and therefore help compel the right behavior and compel the right teachings and get people to take financial auditable credit,” said Ali Fenn, president of data center consulting firm ITRenew.

ITRenew works with hyperscalers to change how they use and deploy IT infrastructure by identifying ways to recycle and reuse the equipment, rather than the traditional “make, use, dispose” data center model.

But taking back IT assets at the end of their use only addresses one part of the problem.

More often than not, businesses don’t own their own servers in their supply chains. They use third-party vendors. “It’s a product-as-a service,” Dull said. “If you think about the ability to run our supply chains, frankly, from home for the last year, it has largely been in part because of the technology we consume as a service.” 

The as-a-service model has the potential to transform supply chains across any industry or vertical from how products are designed and manufactured, to how they are supplied and consumed, Dull added. 

“Instead of selling the product, sell the use of the product,” Genpact SVP Mike Landry said.

A number of industries have already changed their business model to deliver product-as-a-service. “Applications are constantly sensing, predicting, and recommending, finding pockets of waste, and creation of value, whether it's coming to fill rates or inventory reduction or reduction and expedites, we're actually gravitating to what we call value of the service,” Noodle AI GM Gaurav Palta explained.

Diving deeper into the value chain, transforming consumption confronts the reality that humanity currently consumes 1.75 times more resources each year than the Earth can naturally regenerate, a number that is on course to more than double by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum. 

“The only thing we should consume as humans is food,” Fenn said. “The rest of this stuff should not be consumed, we shouldn't think about that word.” Ultimately, consumers aren’t interested in the hardware, they’re interested in the service that hardware provides, she added.  

The seeds of as-a-service are being planted across different sectors. For example, Rolls Royce went from selling the jet engine to selling the thrust that a jet engine makes. And in the tech space, companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and ITRenew offer refurbishment services, which take IT assets of any brand, reduce carbon emissions, and keep e-waste out of landfills.  

Additionally, Dell Technologies has its pay-as-you-go infrastructure program called Project Apex, and HPE has pledged to offer its entire portfolio as a service by 2022. More recently, Cisco pledged to move its portfolio to a subscription model beginning with its Cisco Plus network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform.  

“By selling hardware as a service, we are starting to see that in the way some enterprises have moved entirely to public cloud services, many cannot move their infrastructure for a variety of reasons,” Fenn said. “So can we make compute and infrastructure consumable? Users don't consume the hardware, they want to consume the service of that hardware. I absolutely think everything will ultimately go toward this selling everything as a service model.”