IBM leading battle against e-waste

by FactoryFuture | Oct 11, 2022 | Energy & Environment, Featured Articles, Latest News

IBM, the New York-based technology giant, has recently unveiled its strategy towards combatting e-waste and how it hopes to build towards sustainable manufacturing. The company has identified e-waste as being one of its major obstacles in its drive to deliver sustainable manufacturing and is now seeking to find ways to reduce e-waste. International Business Machines Corporation – known as IBM – was founded in 1911 when it initially traded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in New York. The founding of IBM had been preceeded by Charles Babbage designing the first successful automatic calculator with the first commercially successful computer, the Altair, subsequently produced and sold after the creation of IBM. The 1980's were a key decade in the group's development as IBM launched its Model 5150 for small business owners in 1981 as well as creating the then cutting-edge technology of the floppy disk and the chess-playing system Deep Blue. In 1992, IBM extended its portfolio and branched out into consulting and currently has a revenue of US$57.4bn . Last year, the company took a bold decision and rebranded from IBM Global Business Services to IBM Consulting, feeling that rebranding to IBM Consulting offered the company an opportunity to re-examine the services IBM offers and focus on the problems it solves best for its clients. Bruce Anderson is Managing Partner at IBM Consulting, where he is responsible for overseeing global operations across automotives, aerospace and electronics for IBM Consulting. His role also requires him to provide leadership for delivering business and technology solutions across these three industries. “My team needs to have that forward-looking point of view of what our clients are going to want and need,” states Anderson. “Not only from a consulting perspective, but in the future from a lot of our technology products as well.” “At IBM Consulting, I look at how clients want to use new technology to solve their business problems. I reverse that sentence and say, ‘What are the business problems that our clients are trying to solve?’. Then I look at how our view on technology can accelerate what they're attempting,” explains Anderson. “Obviously, we're very excited about what's been going on with quantum.” Quantum computing is an up-and-coming technology which employs quantum mechanics to fix problems beyond the reach of classical systems.  The operations carried out by quantum computers use principles of quantum mechanics such as superposition, interference and entanglement to solve computaional problems. IBM leads the way in quantum computing with its IBM Quantum System One and Anderson is confident that the company will be able to harness the technology to its advantage. “If you take a look at some of our most complicated problems in supply chain and in manufacturing, they're optimisation problems. Long-running optimisations don't do well on classical systems, so you start to introduce quantum computing into that. You have all sorts of possibilities for more optimal answers in a manufacturing context,” he says. “Everybody has their hands in manufacturing.” Anderson believes that Quantum can be of particular benefit in the electronics industry, where he sees some of the most complex manufacturing in the world. “During COVID-19, there were a lot of disruptions in manufacturing, so now we are seeing enterprises making changes to where they're going to locate their manufacturing and also looking at more advanced manufacturing techniques.”

E-waste and sustainability

As a part of its sustainability initiative, IBM is committed to delivering innovative and scalable solutions across all of the industries it is involved in, from manufacturing to food production. “When you talk about sustainability, you've got to talk about both ends,” says Anderson. “What is it that you're creating? Was it an environmentally responsible process? What is going to happen at the end of its life?” Electronic-waste (or E-waste) represents just 2% of America's landfill waste, but it equates to a whopping 70% of overall toxic waste. E-waste is the term used for discarded electrical or electronic devices and, globally, up to 50m metric tonnes of e-waste is disposed of annually. IBM is looking at how it can increase the lifecycle of its products to reduce the volume of e-waste, with data from its annual ESG report revealing that the company's goal is to limit products sent to landfill to 3%, through reusing and recycling products. In 2021, IBM reused, resold or recycled 97.7% of its end-of-life products, sending 2% to waste-to-energy plants and a final 0.3% to landfill. Anderson hopes more manufacturers will follow. “I think that, as sustainability gets more in the consumer's mind, all manufacturers will respond to these issues. Right now, the world seems to be focused on reporting ‘How good or bad are we? Who is worse than us in the same product category?’ – I call it peeling the onion: grab all the data, peel the onion, take a look at what's rotten and go fix it.” “I just think that accommodating all types of talent, however it presents itself, is something IBM's been a leader in for a long time,” says Anderson. “I think you can say that that sounds very altruistic, but I think it's also just good business as well.” There's a lot of talent out there that doesn't always show up in an expected way, and IBM has been very efficient at figuring out how to find it. Over the next 12 months, the consulting company is looking to draw in new, skilled employees and help their clients prepare for future supply chain disturbances. “I believe that the world feels like it's got its arms around these disruptions,” says Anderson. “But there's more than one, right?” The COVID-19 period caused huge supply chain disruption and havoc to the manufacturing environment, followed by Russia’s war against Ukraine and the political tensions between the US and China. “I think what's going to happen is enterprises, whether or not they are specific to manufacturing, are going to get better at dealing with disruption,” says Anderson. “You won't find them caught saying, ‘We never thought of that scenario’. When you actually bring the data in, analyse it and say, ‘If this scenario happens, this is what we do’ – have your plan backed up by facts.” Anderson believes that this will play very well into what manufacturing consultants in broader corporate functions can do to help their clients in the next year.

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