How we are recycling IT equipment

Recycling is a vital part of waste management. Although we should always be seeking to reduce the amount of waste we create, and trying to reuse waste before even considering recycling, it still serves a vital role within our commitment to sending none of our waste to landfill and working harder to reduce our general waste.

We recycle many different items from across the various Arsenal sites, from paper to plastic, from food to furniture and from glass to grass. 

But we also create some slightly less obvious waste streams that need to be dealt with. 

Following a recent upgrade of our IT equipment, we were left with 15 redundant servers to be removed. Electrical goods, and in particular IT equipment, use many precious metals in their construction, primarily gold, silver and palladium, which are used for their superior conductivity and corrosion resistance. 

They are found in components such as connectors, circuit boards and capacitors, along with copper, cobalt and tungsten. Other valuable metals such as platinum are used in hard drives, and a variety of other metals and rare earth elements are also included in the devices, like tantalum for capacitors and neodymium for magnets. 

In 2022, e-waste contained more than 31 million tonnes of metals, at a value of $91 billion. It is estimated that only 22 per cent of these metals are actually recycled. It is predicted that by 2030 e-waste will increase to 82 million tonnes, showing the huge importance of managing the waste from the IT industry.

Before the servers and other IT equipment are recycled, we have been looking at if they still have further use outside of the club. Reuse is another important part of the waste hierarchy, Reduce, reuse, recycle!

We work closely with organisations to explore opportunities to reuse our old IT equipment to try to get the maximum operational life from it. Only when we cannot find reuse opportunities for the equipment do we make sure that they are correctly recycled, so none of those valuable metals are lost.

Copyright 2025 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.