Wiping a Drive Uses a Kettle's Worth of Power. Replacing It Costs 160 kg of CO2.

Wiping a 1 TB hard drive with a single overwrite uses about 0.09 kWh of electricity, roughly what it takes to boil a full one-litre kettle. Wiping an SSD uses far less: a few grams of CO2e. Manufacturing a new 1 TB SSD is estimated at around 160 kg of CO2e.

Those two numbers explain where carbon really sits in IT asset disposition (ITAD). It isn't in the wipe. It's in the decision that comes after: does this device, and this drive, get used again, or does it go to the shredder?

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1. A device's carbon is spent before it's switched on

Electronics carry most of their climate cost out of the factory with them. The carbon in mining, chip-making and assembly is called embodied carbon, as opposed to the carbon from the electricity a device uses while running.

Dell publishes a product carbon footprint for many of its models. For the Latitude 7350 Detachable (April 2024), the estimate is:

So once a laptop exists, most of its carbon is already spent. Use it longer and you spread that cost over more years. Throw it away early and you've wasted it.

The European Environmental Bureau put a number on this in 2019. Extending the life of every notebook in the EU by one year would save 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2030, which it equates to taking 870,000 cars off the road. It also calculated that for a notebook to compensate for the emissions of its non-use phases (making, distributing and disposing of it), it "would need to last for 20 to 44 years".

2. Storage is where it gets heavy

Flash memory is carbon-intensive to make, which is worth knowing before you shred any. A peer-reviewed study by Swamit Tannu and Prashant Nair, which averaged lifecycle assessments of 94 SSDs, estimates 0.16 kg CO2e per gigabyte of SSD.

Treat these as orders of magnitude, not exact figures. The 160 kg is more than Dell's estimate for the entire laptop above, which shows how much the method matters: Dell models one specific product, while the study averages published assessments of many drives. Both point the same way, though. Flash storage is one of the most carbon-heavy parts of a computer, and shredding a working SSD throws that away.

3. The wipe itself barely registers

We worked out four cases, from a typical SSD wipe to a slow worst case. They're our illustrative assumptions, not measurements, and every row uses 0.7 kg CO2e per kWh, the US grid factor Tannu and Nair used. Your grid is probably cleaner.

An SSD purge, such as crypto erase (destroying the drive's encryption key) or block erase, finishes in seconds to minutes. Most of the time in the first two rows is reading data back to check it. Even the slowest row is about 1/340 of the 160 kg estimated for a new 1 TB SSD. A typical SSD wipe? Closer to 1/30,000.

So the wipe's electricity isn't the problem. You'd save almost nothing by picking a "greener" wipe method. You save a lot by choosing to wipe instead of shred.

4. Where ITAD actually loses carbon

The world generated a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and only 22.3% was documented as properly collected and recycled, according to the UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024. Recycling recovers materials, but it doesn't recover the manufacturing carbon. Reuse does.

On an ITAD floor, you lose carbon at four decision points:

1. "Destroy, to be safe." If you can't show a customer that a drive was sanitized, the shredder looks like the safe choice. A working SSD becomes scrap.
2. "Untested, so recycle." If nobody had time to test a device, you can't grade it or sell it with confidence. So it goes for materials recovery.
3. "Not worth the labour." If it costs you more to process a low-value laptop than it'll sell for, it gets recycled, even when it works.
4. "Ship it to the plant." Moving devices to a central facility has a cost too. A peer-reviewed lifecycle study of laptop remanufacturing (Cranfield University, 2023) found transport, especially by air, was the largest source of the operation's emissions. It also found remanufacturing has a much smaller impact than making a new laptop.

None of these is about the wipe being dirty. All of them are about the device not getting a second life.

5. How remote wipe and diagnostics shift the decision

This is where your tooling matters, and it's what we built reCore around. Each capability below maps to one of those four decision points. (We checked every product detail against reCore's code.)

Proof instead of "destroy, to be safe." reCore picks a purge method for each drive, such as crypto erase, block erase or ATA Secure Erase, and verifies the result with a check that matches the method. Every drive gets its own wipe record, and a second person approves the certificate. That gives an ITAD provider evidence to put in front of a customer who'd otherwise default to shredding. Our guide to SSD reuse vs shredding covers the contract side.

Every device tested, not just the easy ones. From the dashboard, a supervisor can start diagnostics or a stress test on one machine or a whole floor of them. Each device then gets a recorded outcome: ready, repair, parts, recycle or hold. "Untested" stops being a reason to recycle.

Lower cost per device. Wipes and tests start from a browser, in bulk, so one person can keep many benches moving. When handling costs less, more low-value devices are worth reusing. (We haven't measured this saving, so we won't put a number on it.)

Process where the devices are. A reCore station is a USB stick and an internet connection, so devices can be wiped and tested where they already are, including at the customer's site. Devices that will be redeployed inside the same organization never need to travel. Our guide to remote data wipe works through the freight numbers.

A record you can report from. Each drive's record holds its disposition (reuse, transfer or destroy) and the downstream vendor it went to. Each device holds its outcome. Those counts are what a reuse rate, or a carbon estimate, is built from.

6. What to measure on your own floor

Want to know whether your process saves carbon or quietly wastes it? Track these, not wipe energy:

If you report carbon savings, say which emission factors and which "avoided new purchase" assumption you used. A reused laptop only saves carbon if it really replaces a new one.

Conclusion

The carbon question in ITAD isn't "how green is our wipe?" A wipe costs grams of CO2e for an SSD, and about a kettle of electricity for a slow hard-drive pass. The question is how many working devices and drives leave your floor as scrap when they could have been used again. Remote wipe and diagnostics don't shrink a footprint by themselves. They remove the reasons to destroy: no proof, no test, no time. That's how they cut carbon.

Further reading: reCore's data wiping and diagnostics, how grading gives every device an outcome, and pricing for plans and the free trial.

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Sources

• Dell Technologies, Product Carbon Footprint: Latitude 7350 Detachable, April 2024 (PAIA model).
• S. Tannu and P. J. Nair, The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon, ACM SIGENERGY Energy Informatics Review, Vol. 3, Issue 3, October 2023 (first presented at HotCarbon 2022).
• European Environmental Bureau, Coolproducts don't cost the earth (briefing), September 2019.
• ITU and UNITAR, Global E-waste Monitor 2024, March 2024.
• Y. Atescan Yuksek et al., Sustainability assessment of electronic waste remanufacturing: the case of laptop, Procedia CIRP 116 (2023), pp. 378-383.