HOBI International has released its 2025 ESG Report, the third annual edition in the company’s ongoing effort to put measurable numbers behind its environmental, social, and governance work. The report covers calendar year 2025 across HOBI’s three U.S. processing facilities in Dallas, Texas; Batavia, Illinois; and Phoenix, Arizona, and it sets the goals that will guide the company through 2026.
This was a year of disciplined execution rather than a single headline initiative. The results are the cumulative product of choices made on the receiving dock, in the data sanitization lab, on the de-manufacturing line, and in the boardroom.
The Year in Numbers
We received 3,020,030 pounds of end-of-life electronics across our three facilities last year. Of that volume, 1,547,725 pounds were put back into productive use, and 862,826 pounds were recovered as commodities for return to the supply chain. The balance moved through certified downstream channels for final-stage recovery, with material accounting maintained at every step.
The number we keep coming back to is our reuse rate. Fifty-one percent, up 18 percentage points from 2024. That jump is what drove our Circularity Score to 90 out of 100. The score weights how received equipment was ultimately resolved: 51 percent resold for a productive second life, 39 percent responsibly recycled through certified downstream channels, and 10 percent subject to non-circular disposition required by client contract or regulatory mandate.
On emissions, our Scope 2 footprint from purchased electricity totaled 251 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. That is an eight percent reduction year over year. The decline came from lighting and HVAC retrofits at our Illinois and Texas facilities, and from sharper monitoring of facility load profiles. We also completed our first formal accounting of Scope 3 Category 9 emissions, covering downstream transportation and distribution. That number came in at 233 metric tons of CO₂ equivalent. Since this is our first year of Category 9 reporting, it stands as the baseline against which future years will be measured.
Two more numbers we want on the record: zero reportable environmental incidents and zero reportable data security incidents across all three facilities in 2025.
A Reuse-First Disposition Hierarchy
The reuse rate is not an accident of the device mix that happened to come through our doors. Every device is evaluated against a written disposition hierarchy upon arrival. The hierarchy goes reuse first, then component harvesting, then materials recovery, with physical destruction reserved for assets that cannot be safely sanitized or that a client contract requires us to destroy.
The environmental case for reuse is simple. The carbon embedded in manufacturing a new laptop, server, or smartphone is typically much larger than the carbon of running that device for a second life. Every unit we route to reuse therefore, avoids a quantum of embodied emissions and a quantum of virgin material extraction. Where reuse is not possible, materials recovery keeps copper, aluminum, steel, gold, and palladium in the productive supply chain instead of a landfill.
One piece of unfinished work we want to be upfront about. We do not yet publish a single quantified avoided-emissions number from our reuse activity. We are building a device-class methodology anchored in published embodied carbon factors, and we plan to publish a defensible figure in next year’s report. We would rather show our work and arrive at a number we can stand behind than lead with an estimate that does not survive scrutiny.
ESG Report Frameworks and Certifications
The report’s structure follows the disclosure principles of the Global Reporting Initiative Universal Standards and the SASB topic categories most relevant to electronics processing. Our greenhouse gas data uses the operational control approach in the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard, with inventory practices informed by ISO 14064-1. Data sanitization is benchmarked against NIST Special Publication 800-88 Rev. 1.
Behind the frameworks sit five certifications, each one audited annually or biennially by an outside body: R2v3 for responsible recycling, RIOS for integrated quality, environmental, and safety management, ISO 14001 for environmental management, NAID AAA for information destruction, and WBENC certification as a Women’s Business Enterprise. All five remained in good standing throughout 2025.
Governance gets its own chapter for a reason. It is what makes the environmental and social claims credible in the first place. We maintain an independent board of directors, which is unusual for a privately held company of our size, and board agendas in 2025 included scheduled reviews of cybersecurity posture, ESG performance, and our planned services expansion.
The Social Dimension
ESG in our industry has too often been argued on environmental grounds alone. The social side matters at least as much, and our social chapter spends real time on it.
Our workforce development program is built around accessible entry points to skilled work. Most of our processing roles do not require a four-year degree. We have invested in training pathways that move new hires into specialized positions in data sanitization, asset management, refurbishment, and quality assurance.
Community engagement is organized around consistency and proximity—multi-year partnerships in the places where our facilities are located. The 2025 report covers our Dallas team’s long-running partnership with Union Gospel Mission, and our Illinois team’s deepening work with Sanctuary Church and local educational partners in Batavia.
Our most distinctive commitment connects the two ends of the electronics value chain. We continue to support an orphanage school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The program funds classroom-based education, meals, and basic care for children who would otherwise be vulnerable to conscription into artisanal cobalt and tantalum mining. Those metals end up in the same devices we process at the other end of the lifecycle. A serious circular economy program treats the upstream and the downstream as one system.
Looking to 2026
The report closes with a set of 2026 targets, written as commitments we expect to be measured against in next year’s edition.
On the environmental side, we plan to push the reuse rate above this year’s 51 percent baseline, hold the Circularity Score at 90 or higher, keep cutting Scope 2 emissions, publish our first Scope 1 inventory covering on-site fuel and fleet emissions, expand Scope 3 reporting beyond Category 9, and publish the quantified avoided-emissions estimate. On the social and governance side, the targets include expanded workforce development pathways, continued support for the DRC school, and a serious look at independent third-party assurance for select ESG metrics.
Two priorities sit underneath all of it. The first is continued growth in data center decommissioning and hardware refurbishment, with enterprise demand for reuse-first ITAD continuing to climb. The second is the continued maturation of our ESG measurement program. Both are designed to make our impact larger and easier to verify.
Read the Full Report
The 2025 ESG and Carbon Impact Report is our most complete account yet of what disciplined, reuse-first ITAD actually delivers when measured honestly. If your organization counts on us as a disposition partner and needs our performance to hold up in your own ESG disclosures, the figures, methodology notes, and forward targets are worth a careful read.
The complete report is available here.