The Year In Review for 2025
Secure, Sustainable, Scalable: Celebrating SLS’s 2025 Achievements
As 2025 draws to a close, Sims Lifecycle Services (SLS) is proud to reflect on a year defined by deepened client relationships, achieving ambitious sustainability milestones and earning recognition across the industry. Our commitment to secure IT asset disposition and circular economy innovation continues to prove the value of secure, responsible lifecycle management in a rapidly changing world. As the year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate these accomplishments and look ahead to continuing to support our clients.
ITAD Company of the Year
SLS is honored to be named CIO Review’s 2025 ITAD Services Company of the Year, reflecting our leadership in reshaping IT asset disposition by embedding automation, traceability and circularity into every step of the lifecycle process.
At the heart of this achievement is our ITAD+model, which combines advanced automation, secure data processing and component recovery within our global network of Circular Centers. By integrating these capabilities, we deliver enterprise‑scale solutions that are not only secure and efficient but also designed to maximize reuse and sustainability.
Sims Limited: Global Sustainability Leader
In January, Sims Limited was ranked #2 on the 2025 Global 100 List of most sustainable companies worldwide, marking our eleventh inclusion on this influential index. This achievement highlights our ongoing commitment to environmental stewardship, operational transparency, and innovation in circular economy practices.
Strengthening Client Trust Through Operational Excellence
This year, we made significant strides in operational assurance and service quality, the foundation of our client relationships. By earning SOC 1 and SOC 2 certification, we’ve demonstrated that every device is securely tracked, fully documented and audit-ready from intake through final disposition, so clients can trust their data and assets are handled safely and responsibly.
SLS’s sustainability achievements in FY25 translate directly into measurable benefits for our clients. With carbon-neutral Circular Centers, a 71% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions since FY20, and operations powered entirely by renewable electricity, our services carry a significantly lower carbon footprint, helping clients reduce their own Scope 3 emissions.
By repurposing 8.8 million IT assets this year alone, we extended hardware lifecycles through refurbishment and redeployment, allowing organizations to avoid the emissions and costs associated with producing new devices.
Driving Circularity: Rare Earth Recovery and OCP Innovation
We continue to pilot two solutions over the last two years; one that disaggregates drives through mechanical separation and one that cuts off the corner of the drive that houses the magnets.
Mechanical separation for whole drives – The hard drive is mechanically dismantled. Output is disassembled hard drive parts, including clean separation of magnets. The magnets and other clean commodities are sent to downstream processors. Data bearing platters are shredded and destroyed. The remaining clean components are recycled for commodities.
Corner cut separation of hard drive – We have used this process for a large client where we cut the corner off a hard drive, thereby isolating the portion of the drive containing the rare earth magnets. The cut corners are aggregated and sent to a downstream processor who uses chemical separation to isolate the rare earth metals. The hard drive platters (data bearing) are shredded for data destruction along with the remaining hard drive for metal recovery.Rack Renew, a brand of the research arm of SLS, built on their partnership with OCP to make equipment readily available for organizations seeking cost savings and performance. Working with experienced distributors, we provided OCP-hardware in any quantity, from a few servers to thousands of racks, integrated seamlessly with existing systems.
Expanding Global Reach and Value Chain Engagement
We also expanded our value-chain engagement, launching our first subcontractor sustainability maturity survey to collaborate more closely with suppliers and partners and laying the groundwork for a global net-zero service offering.
Additionally this year, we onboarded several subcontractors in multiple new countries to meet highly specialized requirements on behalf of major clients, demonstrating our agility and commitment to client-driven innovation.
SLS in the Spotlight: 2025 Media Highlights
2025 was a year of visibility for SLS, as our leadership in secure IT disposition, data center lifecycle management and circular innovation was featured in major media outlets.
CNBC profiled the booming demand for secure data destruction, spotlighting SLS’s role in helping organizations responsibly erase sensitive information from retired devices. The Wall Street Journal highlighted SLS’s role in shaping sustainable technology value chains amid rapid cloud and data center expansion with an article detailing our rare earth recovery. Earlier in 2025, SLS was prominently featured in Resource Recycling for the “extraordinary” volumes of repurposed data center assets we are processing, enabling our clients to redeploy critical components at a time when availability is increasingly constrained.
Within the industry, SLS received considerable attention at the OCP EMEA Summit, where we unveiled a breakthrough approach to CXL memory reuse. At the summit, SLS revealed a first in hyperscale circularity: the redeployment of recovered DIMM memory at production-grade quality for CXL environments, transforming end-of-life hardware into reliable, high-performance and in-demand components for data centers.
Looking Ahead to 2026
As we celebrate the successes of 2025, we are already setting our sights on the opportunities that 2026 will bring. Early next year, we will open a new Circular Center in Bengaluru, India, strengthening our ability to deliver secure, sustainable and scalable ITAD solutions in one of the world’s fastest-growing technology regions.
From modernizing our global network of Circular Centers to advancing innovation in ITAD and data center services, SLS is poised to continue leading the way in sustainability, security, and client value.
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