Driving the
circular economy
for storage
circular economy
for storage
The Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) is a partnership of global leaders in digital storage, data centers, sustainability, and blockchain collaborating to reduce e-waste by enabling, driving, and promoting the secure reuse of storage hardware.




Industry lead with the guidance of
Bill McDonough
CDI was convened under the leadership of William McDonough, Chief Executive of McDonough Innovation and the renowned architect of Cradle to Cradle design and The Circular Economy, which brings circular design principles and reporting to data storage in the ICT industry.
“Much of the e-waste we see from hard drives today is driven by perceived risk and insufficient secondary markets for this technology; I am thrilled to welcome these founding members on board the initiative as we create a compelling global Circular Economy business case.”
William McDonough, Chief Executive, McDonough Innovation

Making an impact
“Seagate’s value of Integrity compels us to take meaningful and measurable action on climate change, and on responsible minerals and metals consumption and production,”
“We are committed to building circularity into every drive we create. In addition, we are dedicated to minimizing our environmental impact through the reuse, recovery, and recycling of drives and drive components. Seagate is delighted to share in the collective responsibility to efficiently use the earth’s finite resources.”


Joan Motsinger, CDI founding Board member and Seagate’s sustainability and transformation senior vice president.
We are on a mission to make storage more sustainable.
Making the storage market more sustainable by developing and promoting standards, reporting, and best practices around circularity
Evolving Data Security: A Comparative Analysis of IEEE 2883-2022 and NIST SP 800-88r1 Standards
Author: Jonmichael Hands, Circular Drive Initiative In the dynamic world [...]
OCP and CDI Whitepaper: Data Sanitization Enabling the Circular Economy
Summary Chia co-authored a new whitepaper on the impact of [...]