Every kilogram of equipment we take in keeps 117 kilograms of carbon out of the air
That number looks wrong until you understand where the emissions in a laptop actually come from. Almost none of them come from using it. Here is what our 2025 report says, in terms you can picture.
117 kg CO2e avoided
Across 2025 we received 50,520 kg of electronics and avoided 5,927,479 kg of CO2e. The ratio holds because a repaired device is a device nobody had to manufacture.
Emissions avoided through reuse and recycling
Electronics received and processed
Went back into service rather than being broken down
Units processed for logical sanitization
What 5,927,479 kg of CO2e actually means
That is 5,927 metric tons. Two words in the phrase are doing the work, and both get misunderstood.
CO2e
Short for carbon dioxide equivalent. Carbon dioxide is not the only gas that warms the planet. Methane and nitrous oxide do it too, and more aggressively per kilogram. CO2e converts all of them into one common unit so a mixed set of emissions can be expressed as a single number.
Avoided
This is the one people get wrong. Avoided is not the same as removed. Nothing was pulled out of the atmosphere. These emissions were never created in the first place, measured against a baseline where the same demand gets met by manufacturing new equipment instead.
Of driving that never happened. That is 595 trips around the Earth at the equator.
Parked for a full year. The average passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 tons annually.
Of gasoline never burned. Roughly 667,000 US gallons.
Of forest absorbing carbon for a year. About 28 square kilometres of trees.
Round trip Toronto to London in economy. The loosest of these five comparisons.
Recycling is not where the benefit lives
The real saving comes from manufacturing that never happens.
Most people assume recycling is the environmentally useful part. It helps, but it still burns energy: collection, transport, shredding, smelting, refining. Materials come back, but not for free.
Building a laptop is the carbon heavy part of its life. Mining bauxite for aluminum, refining copper, fabricating circuit boards, moulding plastics, then shipping a finished unit across an ocean. By the time a laptop reaches a desk, most of its lifetime carbon footprint has already been spent before it is switched on for the first time.
When we take a working Toughbook, replace the battery and screen, wipe the drive and sell it again, all of that is skipped. That is the entire reason the ratio at the top of this page looks the way it does.
The carbon footprint of one new laptop, from factory to scrap
Digging up ore, refining metal, etching circuit boards, moulding plastic, assembling the unit. Almost all of a laptop's carbon is burned here, before anyone has touched it.
Freight from an Asian factory to a North American warehouse, then on to the buyer. Small next to manufacturing, but it only happens because a new unit was built.
Every hour of electricity across years of service. This is the part people assume is the whole story, and it is less than a fifth of it.
Collection, shredding and smelting at the end of life. Recycling is the smallest slice on this chart, which is why recycling alone cannot carry the argument.
Buy refurbished and the first two blocks are already spent. Somebody else paid that carbon when the laptop was built in 2019 or 2021. You get a second life out of it without repeating the expensive part.
Illustrative proportions based on published laptop lifecycle assessments, not Rugged Books measurements. The exact split varies by model and by how many years the device stays in service.
50,520 kg came through our doors
That is 50.5 metric tons of electronics in a single year, all of it already written off by somebody else.
For scale: an average business laptop weighs about 2.5 kg. A fully rugged unit with a magnesium alloy case and sealed ports runs 3 to 4 kg. Fifty tons is a lot of hardware that was one decision away from a landfill.
Where our material went after processing: 44,428 kg shipped downstream
Whole devices that went back into service with a new owner. This is the number that drives everything else on this page.
Units too far gone to save, sent to R2 certified downstream partners for material recovery. Verifying where this goes is what the certification exists to do.
Some refurbishers ship repair work to third parties. We do ours in house, which is why this line reads zero.
Nine of every ten kilograms went back to work rather than being broken down for parts and scrap.
If you compare the two figures, 50,520 kg received against 44,428 kg shipped downstream, there is a 6,092 kg difference. That is equipment still in process at the end of the reporting year. It carries into the 2026 report rather than disappearing.
What 50 tons of old computers is made of
Rugged hardware is unusually metal heavy, and that shapes where the benefit sits.
Aluminum is over half the total weight, which follows from how many rugged cases are metal alloy rather than plastic. It is also where a large share of the saving sits.
Producing aluminum from bauxite ore is one of the most energy intensive industrial processes there is. Recycling it uses roughly 95 percent less energy than making it new, and reusing a chassis uses none at all.
Material composition of everything we received in 2025
No CRT glass and no other glass was received in 2025. Component figures are rounded and sum to slightly under the reported intake total.
Your data gone, the drive still alive
Physical destruction means shredding or drilling the drive. It works, and for some contracts it is required. But it turns a functioning component into scrap, and a replacement has to be manufactured to take its place.
Every drive we handled in 2025 was sanitized to standard, verified, and returned to service instead. Six thousand units, zero kilograms destroyed. Data security does not have to cost hardware.
What this means when you buy from us
Choosing a refurbished Toughbook, Getac, Dell Rugged or Durabook over a new one is not a small gesture. You remove a full manufacturing cycle from the supply chain, and you usually pay 40 to 60 percent less to do it.
The environmental case and the budget case point the same direction here. That does not happen often.
Shop refurbished rugged laptopsHow we got these numbers
We would rather show the work than ask you to take the figures on faith.
Where the data comes from
These figures come from our 2025 R2 Impact Measurement Report, produced under our R2v3 certification. The avoided emissions calculation was performed by Ecotone, an independent impact research and strategy consultancy, covering reuse and recycling of mobile phones, laptops and flat panel displays.
Material composition estimates follow UNITAR's guidelines on e-waste classification, reporting and indicators. All figures cover the 2025 calendar year and are self reported by Rugged Books Inc.
What the avoided figure does not capture
It is a model, not a meter reading. It compares our reuse and recycling activity against a baseline in which the same demand is met by new manufacturing.
Composition estimates are not available for every electronics type, so part of the material breakdown is estimated rather than weighed. Component weights are rounded and do not sum exactly to the reported intake total.
The conversion factors behind the comparisons
We used published US EPA greenhouse gas equivalency factors to turn metric tons into everyday comparisons:
- Driving: 400 grams CO2e per mile
- Vehicles: 4.6 metric tons per passenger vehicle per year
- Gasoline: 8.887 kg CO2 per US gallon
- Forest: 0.84 metric tons CO2 per acre per year
- Flights: approximately 1 metric ton per economy passenger, Toronto to London round trip
Aviation estimates vary widely between methodologies, so treat the flight comparison as the loosest of the five.
Why there is no "homes powered" comparison
We left household electricity comparisons out on purpose. Ontario's grid runs largely on nuclear and hydro, so a "homes powered for a year" figure calculated on a North American average would overstate what the saving means locally. We would rather publish four honest comparisons than five flattering ones.
Rugged Books Inc. holds R2v3, ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015 and ISO 45001:2018 certifications. Questions about this report, our downstream chain of custody, or data sanitization procedures for your organisation are welcome. We will answer them with specifics.