ESG: Taking the Temperature of
Corporate Health

Environmental

A company's impact on the natural environment, including workplace and community health.

Social

A company's impact on people, including its relationships with employees, customers, and the broader community.

Governance

A company's leadership, structure, accountability, fairness, and diversity policies.

e-Stewards: ESG in Action

ESG has always been at the root of e-Stewards. 

Before e-Stewards’ inception, the creator of e-Stewards, Basel Action Network (BAN), identified and denounced the dumping of hazardous e-waste on people and environments in developing countries as an e-waste horror show. But BAN went beyond the usual advocacy actions of protest: we created a tool of accountability to solve the problem.  

That tool is the e-Stewards Certification Program.

e-Stewards: An ESG tool for Recyclers and their Customers

E: Environmental Benefits

e-Stewards Standard: Those certified to the e-Stewards Standard for Ethical and Responsible Reuse, Recycling, and Disposition of Electronics Equipment and Information Technology already document key indicators of ESG criteria including: 

  • Stewardship Management System (SMS) 
  • Stewardship Policy & Objectives 
  • Risk Assessment of all Operations 
  • Identification List of all Stewardship Aspects 
  • Listing of all Compliance Obligations

The e-Stewards Standard requires best practices for proper environmentally sound management, legal compliance, downstream due diligence, while instilling principles embodied by the waste management hierarchy, the precautionary principle and life-cycle perspective.

e-Stewards Global Impact Calculator: The e-Stewards calculator tool is designed to estimate some of the key environmental benefits of recycling your electronic waste with e-Stewards Certified processors. The benefits are measured in three critical areas: 1) Greenhouse gas avoidance, 2) Toxic metals diverted from export, dumping, or disposal, and 3) valuable metals diverted from landfill or disposal  

This calculator is available on the Apple App Store.  

S: Social Benefits and Adjunct Programs

NAID AAA Certified Data Security and Privacy Protection: To ensure client privacy is fully protected, e-Stewards requires all data be destroyed in accordance with the NAID AAA Certification — a prerequisite for all e-Stewards Processor operations. 

Occupational Safety and Health:  e-Stewards processors are required to provide extra precautions in industrial hygiene for hazardous technologies in the recycling field such as shredders and compactors.  

Digital Equity/Inclusion:  e-Stewards has pioneered social impact programs in Digital Inclusion that have been adopted by many e-Stewards organizations that provide low-income and marginalized communities with access to the digital world at low cost.  

Workforce Inclusion: Further, we have created a unique recycling employment engagement program for disabled individuals known as ADVANCE+.  More can be learned about ADVANCE+ [here.] 

G: Governance Benefits

Thorough Audits:  Accountability begins with our Standard and the auditors that audit to it at least once yearly 

EarthEye Tracking: e-Stewards pioneered GPS tracking to enhance due diligence and transparency. This technology is used routinely and randomly to verify performance of our e-Stewards processors, but can also be purchased separately by e-Stewards Processors and e-Stewards Enterprises to augment their own due diligence programs.  

Unannounced Inspections: e-Stewards uniquely performs random unannounced inspections on their Certified processors to verify performance and assure greater accountability. 

Critical non-Conformity Policy: e-Stewards uniquely applies a critical non-conformity policy that allows for the program to dismiss egregious willful violators of the e-Stewards Standard.

Downstream Due Diligence: e-Stewards Processors must ensure that the e-Stewards Standard is applied for all Materials of Concern through each downstream tier of management to final disposition.