Growing interests in artificial intelligence, and high-performance and cloud computing are driving demand for data centers. At a data center, rack servers are fundamental computing engines with high complexity that have numerous mechanical, electrical, and electronic components, e.g., processors, memory bars, storage drives, and power supply units. Although energy efficiency is a key focus in data center operations, manufacturing rack server components themselves account for 40–50% of the total carbon footprint, which is often overlooked. When these components reach their end-of-life (EoL) they have differing value that affects recovery strategy/disposal route, which in turn directly influences the overall environmental impact. Thus, it is important to assess the environmental burden of rack servers, including manufacturing and circularity trade-offs for different EoL pathways. This paper presents a life cycle assessment (LCA) based approach to quantify environmental benefits of adopting a value recovery and life cycle engineering approach for rack servers as compared with a business-as-usual (BAU) EoL management. A system boundary was considered to include both the manufacturing and the EoL stage with different circularity options for the LCA modeling which involved goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory analysis for manufacturing and EoL phases, and life cycle impact assessment. Results show a 36% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and an improvement in eutrophication by 99.2% with a circularity approach.
Kumar et al. (Thu,) studied this question.