Organizations are under growing pressure to reduce both costs and carbon. Procurement teams must stretch IT budgets further while helping their organizations meet increasingly ambitious sustainability goals. Yet those objectives have often been difficult to pursue together.
Refurbished devices offer a compelling opportunity to lower both acquisition costs and emissions. The challenge has been confidence. Procurement teams have often lacked detailed, auditable carbon data that allows them to compare refurbished devices alongside new ones and justify those decisions internally.
Lenovo is helping address that challenge by introducing device- and geography-specific Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data across its Lenovo Certified Refurbished (LCR) portfolio. Rather than relying on generic estimates, customers can now access more precise carbon data for more than 100 refurbished ThinkPad models, helping them evaluate cost, performance, and carbon together when making IT procurement decisions.
The result is a more practical approach to circular IT. Lenovo Certified Refurbished devices deliver enterprise-grade performance at a lower acquisition cost, while generating around 50%1. lower carbon emissions than comparable new devices. Better data makes those benefits easier to measure, compare, and act on.
Giving procurement teams data they can trust
Reducing carbon is no longer just a sustainability objective. Increasingly, it has become part of everyday procurement decision-making. Organizations need credible evidence to compare new and refurbished products, support reporting requirements, and demonstrate progress against climate commitments.
That makes the quality of the underlying data just as important as the devices themselves.
By providing more specific product carbon footprint data, Lenovo is giving procurement and sustainability teams a stronger basis for decision-making and reporting. There are now over 100 Product Carbon Footprints available on compliance.lenovo.com, covering all LCR ThinkPad devices currently on the market.
Each product carbon footprint is based on a lifecycle assessment aligned with ISO 14067 and independently assured. It accounts for emissions across the device’s second life, including refurbishment, replacement parts, transport, electricity use, and end-of-life treatment.
This gives procurement and sustainability teams a stronger evidence base for procurement decisions, making it easier to compare options consistently and support reporting frameworks such as SBTi2.
Enterprise grade devices without the trade-offs
Carbon data only matters if organizations can trust the devices behind it.
Every Lenovo Certified Refurbished device undergoes an extensive refurbishment process that includes secure data sanitization, cleaning, inspection, and comprehensive functional testing. Components that do not meet Lenovo’s acceptance standards are replaced before the device returns to service.
The process enables Lenovo to provide a standard one-year OEM device warranty, a one-year OEM battery warranty, and the option to upgrade to onsite Premier Support.
The result is a refurbished device designed for enterprise deployment, combining Lenovo-backed quality assurance with lower cost and lower carbon emissions.
Turning circular procurement into measurable business outcomes
The real value of better carbon data is not the numbers themselves. It is the ability to make better business decisions.
With trusted carbon data and assured device quality, organizations can more confidently evaluate refurbished devices as part of their IT procurement strategy, comparing cost and carbon together rather than as separate decisions.
The impact can be significant. In a recent simulation for a global consulting firm, Lenovo modelled the effect of replacing 30% of the organization’s notebook fleet with Lenovo Certified Refurbished devices. The results suggested that organizations could simultaneously reduce:
- IT spend by 8%
- IT-related carbon emissions by 15%
- Total Scope 3 emissions by 3%
The simulation demonstrates how circular procurement can move beyond sustainability ambition and deliver measurable business value. Rather than asking organizations to choose between financial performance and environmental progress, refurbished IT, supported by credible carbon data, makes it possible to advance both.
Giving procurement teams the confidence to act
For many organizations, the biggest obstacle to adopting circular IT has not been the availability of refurbished devices. It has been the ability to evaluate them with confidence.
By combining enterprise-grade refurbished devices with independently assured, device-specific Product Carbon Footprints, Lenovo is helping procurement teams make decisions based on clearer evidence rather than assumptions. Customers can compare cost, performance, and carbon together, making it easier to reduce IT spend, lower emissions, and build sustainability into everyday procurement decisions.
1Based on weighted sales data from 2025, aligned functional units and defined cradle‑to‑grave system boundaries. All first‑life manufacturing and use impacts are excluded under the cut‑off approach. Read more about Lenovo’s LCA methodology here.
