We’ve arrived at the point in the year where we take stock of our accomplishments, put the final touches on 2025’s plans, and take a brief break to recharge before diving into a new year of new opportunities.
I am happy to report that SERI has accomplished much in 2024 toward our mission to champion and drive the sustainable use, reuse, and recycling of electronics globally. The R2 TAC successfully added photovoltaic modules (solar panels) to the R2 Standard, making it possible to leverage the existing network of R2 Certified facilities to safely and sustainably reuse and recycle PV modules. In addition, SERI ramped up our assurance activities to continually improve the quality of the R2 Certification program (more on that below). We also launched a brand-new conference designed to be the nexus for collaboration among all the stakeholders in our industry. The eSummit was a resounding success, and we will announce details soon for an even bigger event in 2025.
“The world needs electronics sustainability, and it is up to all of us to deliver. I’m excited to see what we can accomplish together in 2025.”
Corey Dehmey
In 2024, we significantly expanded the SERI team globally, adding team members in Spain, India, Ecuador, and Australia. All told, our full-time staff has grown from 9 to 16, with plans to add again in 2025. We are growing to continue to do more to help the world transition to a circular economy of electronics for a sustainable future.
But one of the challenges with our work as an industry is measuring the impact of all the good we do by keeping electronics in use longer, recovering critical raw materials, and reducing waste throughout the value chain. With better data comes better decision making because it’s much harder to change what you don’t measure.
The challenge we face today is that we currently only extrapolate impact through the number of R2 Certified facilities. We know that R2 refurbishers and recyclers significantly and positively impact the world. From bridging the digital divide by delivering used electronics to people around the world to recovering materials from end-of-life electronics, R2 Certified facilities are making real differences that we need to quantify. So, as we look ahead to 2025, we are asking R2 Certified facilities to report specific information to SERI so we can tell the story of our collective impact. SERI will aggregate the measurements of every R2 facility and report on the impact of the R2 network as a whole.
While we believe an impact report is a powerful first step, we need to take measurement even further. To that end, in 2024, SERI assembled a new ESG TAC to develop a new standard built for quantifying impacts in the electronics value chain with consistent and verifiable measurements. When someone says they recycled 100 tonnes of e-waste, how do you know it was really recycled and not dumped in a far-away country instead? How do you know your devices really were reused, and how do you measure the social impact of that choice? How do you measure the carbon avoidance resulting from using electronics longer and recycling other electronics, and who in the chain gets to claim the credit? These are the challenges to managing impact that the new standard will address. Along with the standard, in 2025, SERI is building a companion system to independently verify this data. To be clear, we aren’t creating a system to verify an ESG report or certify a facility to the standard. Rather, this system will verify the claims that feed into ESG reports. Together, the standard and verification system will create confidence in the consistency and validity of claims made about the reuse and recycling of electronics for a wide range of stakeholders.
SERI views electronics sustainability as being able to enjoy all the benefits of technology without incurring the negative impacts like waste pollution, depleting natural resources, and contributing to climate change. There is so much opportunity to significantly reduce our negative impact. And it’s not big moonshot goals. It’s all the little things. We can use our electronics longer. We can reuse them. And we can recover all the materials from our electronics to reuse in new products. The question is, how committed are we to a more sustainable world for future generations? Beyond just a materials issue, eliminating e-waste must remove the wasted opportunity in the full lifecycle of our electronics.
As proud as I am of the progress we’ve collectively made, we can step it up and do even better to increase our positive impacts and reduce the negative. The electronics value chain is a powerful catalyst for sustainability. Electronics touch just about every business and every person in the world. Collectively, all the decisions we each make with electronics have significant impacts everywhere. I am taking this moment as we reflect on 2024 and look forward to 2025 to challenge every one of us to push even further.
For our part, SERI is investing more time and resources in our auditors in 2025 and will ask them to up their game. We will be teaching more in-depth ways to audit the effectiveness of R2 facilities’ legal compliance program along with an increased focus on FM Management Plans and Downstream Vendors. The SERI Assurance program will support auditors with information from our own investigative activities. Where there are cases of fraud or off-book transactions that are not disclosed to the auditors, SERI has and will be terminating license agreements of R2 Certified facilities.
We also challenge our R2 facilities to do better. The majority of R2 Certified facilities are exemplary, really embracing the standard and using it to drive the growth of their business. But for those facilities that are not, more nonconformances and potentially even a suspension are in their future. The lowest performers will be challenged to step up or exit the program in 2025.
The world needs electronics sustainability, and it is up to all of us to deliver. I’m excited to see what we can accomplish together in 2025.
With much gratitude for everyone who was a part of our collective positive impact in 2024, I, along with the entire SERI team, wish our R2 community health, happiness, and continued success in 2025.
