Making E-Waste Reduction Part of Print Contracts
A first for the print industry: Ricoh and Closing the Loop are integrating e-waste reduction directly into print service contracts. For the first time, every printer placed comes with a built-in commitment to actively remove e-waste from the global value chain.
Innovation for Print Services
Waste Reduction as a Service is already proven across multiple device propositions, but this marks its first application within printing. For every multifunctional printer (A3 MFP) placed, around 2.5 kilos of e-waste is collected and responsibly recycled, adding up to 12,500 kilos of reduction worldwide over the lifetime of the agreement.
What makes this significant for the industry is the model itself. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate initiative, waste reduction is embedded into the contract by default, making circularity a standard feature of the service rather than an extra.
Public Procurement Leading the Way
An example is the collaboration with the Dutch Central Government, where e-waste reduction has been written directly into the tender, driven by the ambition to make its print environment more sustainable.
“Public procurement has the power to accelerate systemic change. By integrating e-waste reduction into this collaboration, we translate circularity ambitions into tangible impact and strengthen the transition to a circular ICT sector.”
Building on Existing Circularity
Ricoh has been focused on circular product design and responsible processing of equipment for a long time. This collaboration adds a new dimension. Alongside reusing materials within the chain, e-waste is now actively taken out of it, layering measurable additional impact on top of a solution that is already circular by design.
As Nicolette Kraay, SDG Impact Lead at Ricoh Netherlands, puts it:
“More and more organizations are looking for ways to align their IT procurement with their sustainability goals, without compromising continuity and quality. With this approach, we add demonstrable extra impact to a solution that is already designed to be circular.”
Built on Partnership
The circular economy is never built by a single company. It is built through collaboration across the value chain. Together with Ricoh and their clients, we are proud to take another step towards more sustainable print services.
