E-scrap and ITAD firm Sunnking has changed its name to reflect the wider suite of services the company performs beyond asset recovery. Among those services, the company is highlighting the sustainability metrics it reports for clients, which is a growing trend throughout the asset recovery sector.
Brockport, New York-headquartered Sunnking on April 9 announced its new name is Sunnking Sustainable Solutions. The rebrand emphasizes four key areas of services: ITAD, asset recovery, data destruction and environmental, social and governance reporting.
Adam Shine, president of Sunnking, said the change reflects how the company has evolved since launching in 2000. For its first decade, the company was focused on servicing businesses by retiring their devices for free and reselling them for the highest value possible. In 2010, things shifted significantly with the implementation of New York’s e-scrap program. Sunnking began recycling devices from the consumer electronics stream.
As that program developed and the company settled into holding regular collection events for a steady supply of inbound material on the consumer side, company leaders decided to make a renewed push for serving business clients, Shine said. That refocusing began about six years ago, involving working with larger corporate clients and performing a variety of services beyond just asset retirement. For instance, in some cases Sunnking receives used PCs from a corporate client, upgrades components such as the memory, upgrades the software and returns it to the client for redeployment.
In working with those clients, the company saw an emerging service it could provide. Corporate customers often have an interest or even a requirement to tell shareholders how they are conducting business in environmentally responsible ways. And over the past few years, electronics recycling and asset disposition has been increasingly understood to fit squarely within a corporate organization’s environmental footprint.
“So as part of this rebrand, it was really important that we had an ESG focus, so that our larger customers can report back to shareholders,” Shine said. He added Sunnking was interested in calculating ESG metrics for its own business activities, also in line with a growing trend for recycling firms.
Along with the rename, Sunnking began offering an online portal for clients to track data about their retired devices, including ESG metrics. The metrics draw from calculations issued by the U.S. EPA, and they include estimates like greenhouse gas emissions avoided by refurbishing devices, water gallons saved from reuse versus mining new materials, and electricity savings.
ITAD can play into the social component of ESG, with activities like charitable donations connected to device retirement or other work with nonprofits, and to the governance portion through emphasizing adherence to data destruction standards. The online platform Sunnking uses allows for those activities to be measured as well, providing clients with a total ESG score.
ESG reporting is still in what might be considered the early stages of adoption in the ITAD world. In an annual client survey from ITAD firm Cascade Asset Management, ITAD customers regularly report that they’re interested in environmental reporting, but it’s less important to their business decision-making than proper data management or value recovery.
Shine agreed that it’s still early, and he noted the ESG trend may evolve to be called something else or to include more types of business activities under its umbrella. But he said he sees staying power in environmental reporting in some form.
“I think the concept behind it is here to stay, and I think it’s going to become more and more important to certain customers, that if you can’t provide that service, we can’t work with you,” Shine said.
