Amazon announced a series of achievements through its data center hardware circularity program, including diverting more than 99% of decommissioned racks from Amazon Web Services (AWS) facilities from landfill so far in 2024.

Amazon’s hardware circularity program forms part of its plan to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2040, as well as its initiatives to address the sustainability aspects of its rapidly growing data center footprint, driven by increasing demand for AI and cloud computing services.

The company announced last year plans to open a “re:Cycle Reverse Logistics hub” to extend the useful life of data center hardware, providing facilities for server racks to be demanufactured, and for components to be repaired and tested for re-use. Earlier this year, Amazon announced the expansion of the re:Cycle Reverse Logistics program to Europe through a facility in Dublin.

According to Amazon, more than 99% of the decommissioned racks sent to the facilities were diverted from landfill, either through re-use by AWS, sale into the secondary market, or recycling. According to Amazon, AWS has sourced 13% of its spare parts from its own re-uses inventory from the reverse logistics facilities, and the company anticipates that this will increase as it expands its circular economy efforts.

Additional components of Amazon’s hardware circularity program highlighted by the company include initiatives to use better design practices, including eliminating excess materials, designing to extend the lifetime of equipment, enabling repair and reuse, and working with suppliers to use more  recycled and sustainable materials, as well as efforts to operate equipment for longer periods of time.

In addition to its landfill diversion achievement, Amazon said that its circularity efforts have allowed AWS to avoid the purchase of 295,000 new hard drives since 2023 by extending server lifetime, and that it has recycled or sold on secondary markets 23.5 million data center components since 2023.

Manju Murugesan, AWS’s Circular Economy Strategy Lead, said:

“We’re committed to investing and innovating in sustainability to create a more sustainable future. Embracing circularity represents a paradigm shift in resource management, and at AWS, we’re leveraging multiple strategies to drive this transformation. We’re challenging the traditional ‘take-make-waste’ model, taking a holistic approach to extend the lifecycle of our resources.”