IT sustainability

AU allocates a lot of its resources to IT equipment. As an employee, you will occasionally be encouraged to replace your equipment, such as your PC, phone or tablet. This can be for several reasons: 

  • The expected service life of the equipment
  • The available support for the equipment 
  • IT security 
  • Sustainability 

Purchased PCs have a four-year warranty, so if there are operational problems with machines that are more than four or five years old, IT recommends that they be replaced. It doesn’t pay to keep them running after that many years. 

For safety reasons, it might be necessary to replace equipment, partly because older machines cannot be encrypted, which is an AU requirement.

When is it sustainable to replace? 

It is very difficult to determine the most sustainable service time for an individual piece of IT equipment. New products are usually much more energy efficient than older ones, so it is not necessarily sustainable to keep a PC or a phone running for as long as possible. 

What happens to old IT equipment? 

Replaced IT equipment is reused. For example, AU has an agreement with the company Refurb, which purchases old equipment, cleans it responsibly and then resells it. 

Read more about how you can work sustainably at your office in

AU’s Green Guide