1. UKSIF Circular Economy
24 March 2017
Jonathan Perry
Environmental Affairs EMEA

2. Dell’s model of a closed-loop plastics supply chain
When a customer drops off equipment – any brand, any condition – at one of the 2,000 participating Goodwill locations that provide free e-waste recycling (and by the way, please don’t load up an 18-wheeler and take that to Goodwill – the program is for the home user). When a customer drops off the equipment, it gets disassembled and processed first by Goodwill and then harder-to-recycle parts are sent on to Wistron GreenTech here in Texas. WGT typically recovers more than 95% of materials for resale or for waste-to-energy. While some of those materials, like the $80,000 worth of gold they recovered in a month, get sold on the commodities market, we have them ship the plastics back to our manufacturing partners in China.
This takes advantage of the current trade gap in goods, making sure those freighters aren’t going back empty, by the way.
There, our partners will further process the plastics – eventually melting it down, mixing it and molding it into new parts.
These go on to be assembled and shipped out to you. That whole process, from the day you dropped off that broken HP at Goodwill to your purchase of a new OptiPlex all-in-one, takes about six months.

3. 4.7
million kilos