Reduce, RE-USE, recycle

SHARE Reflections are a series of short pieces that record the questions, dilemmas, and insights that arise as we navigate sustainability in the course of our research. These reflections document the real discussions happening within our community—conversations where environmental ideals meet personal circumstances, structural inequalities, ethical concerns, and practical constraints.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is a familiar mantra to many concerned about environmental sustainability.  For this third reflection in our series of SHARE Reflections we focus on the reuse of digital technology, something playing an ever increasing role in all forms of health research.   

The subject was proposed by the SHARE team in India who reported pushback from their institution’s IT department on their request for a refurbished laptop for use on SHARE.  SHARE teams in other countries have experienced similar challenges around the use of refurbished laptops within their institutions, and such challenges have also been reported in the interviews being conducted with health researchers as part of SHARE’s empirical research strand. 

Following the IT department in India’s initial surprise that a researcher would even ask for a refurbished laptop when they had sufficient budget to purchase a new one, they explained that if the Indian team insisted on a refurbished model then there would be no guarantee or support provided by the IT department should something go wrong with the laptop – responsibility for fixing the problem would lie with the SHARE researchers. This immediately felt onerous, given the variety of things that could go wrong, from issues with storage and data encryption, to software updates including to packages needed specifically for the SHARE research.  It added a whole new layer of responsibility for the SHARE researchers and in a domain in which they lacked expertise. The Kenyan SHARE team’s experience of a self-imposed "refurbished laptops only” policy, which resulted in their needing to buy four laptops in three years, highlighted the challenges they might face.   

Researchers being anxious to take some responsibility for the environmental impacts of their research, but feeling they lack the expertise to do so, has been highlighted in a recent study undertaken by SHARE’s co-lead, Gabby Samuel. The study highlighted the drawbacks of simply diverting responsibility to institutions and requiring them to regulate researchers, and proposed more collective action, such as researchers engaging in advocacy and awareness building. SHARE members aligned with this, proposing that, where refurbishment standards were lacking and refurbished laptops were consequently unreliable, the best solution was perhaps to take a new laptop but push for assurances on how its useful lifetime could be maximised (for example, by extending warranties through negotiations with suppliers), and its eventual decommissioning undertaken with minimal adverse environmental impacts. 

Another option to extend laptop lifetimes, adopted informally by the SHARE team in Kenya and happening more formally at the Brazil team’s institution, is to make older, less reliable laptops available for ‘light use’ tasks, for example those using packages like Word or Excel. This approach limits the risks associated with laptop failure as well as (in theory) reducing the need for an institution to procure so many new laptops. As the Brazil team reported, it also means that students can develop some skills at managing issues with their refurbished laptops – skills that they might not otherwise acquire, and that could go some way to address the rapid and often unnecessary turnover of tech prevalent in society more widely. 

This reflection has again highlighted the connection between our individual sustainability challenges and those of the health research sector we are studying.  It has surfaced tensions between sustainability and (the researcher’s burden of) responsibility and come up with some practical solutions to balance these in specific contexts.