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HP Products Built to Protect the Environment
Written by Jean S. Bozman and Crawford Del Prete, originally published February 2007
Executive Summary
Eco-responsibility is an increasingly important item for customers. While the term “eco-responsibility” may have different meanings for different customers, it’s clear that what was once an aspiration is now becoming more central to business planning and purchasing decisions.
Customers are becoming mindful of the ways in which their operations affect the environment. This includes labor decisions, parts sourcing, research and development (R&D), as well as in their IT decisions. While this paper focuses on the role of IT and environmental responsibility in the enterprise, this new sense of ecoresponsibility is true for all customer types, including consumers. In fact, consumers today are more aware that their everyday decisions impact the environment.
This paper outlines why these efforts are important, and what one supplier, Hewlett-Packard, is doing to increase customers’ ability to support eco-friendly initiatives.
Specifically, these initiatives address:
• A global supplier code of conduct and partner programs ensuring compliance with environmental egulations and stakeholder expectations
• Energy efficiency and reduction in power/cooling requirements for HP products
• A robust asset-recovery services program that protects the environment through reuse and recycling of IT products and safe disposal of hazardous substances
As an early supplier of eco-aware technologies, HP climbed a learning curve starting in the 1990s and then leveraged what it learned to accelerate its program in recent years. Importantly, HP’s large PC and printer product businesses provided it with early insights into developing products with environmental impacts in mind . and programs to prevent environmental damage via reclamation of used products, proper disposal of older products, along with supplier programs to ensure restricted materials are not used in the components on which HP’s products are built.
It’s important to note that these efforts go far beyond any one aspect of ecoresponsibility. They span the entire product life cycle, from design to disposal. At each stage in acquiring and using a product, customers have important decisions to make, such as:
• Is this product consuming too much power?
• Can I easily and securely dispose of it?
• Will my data be properly protected?
Without proper planning, these can be very intimidating and expensive questions to answer. However, with some forethought, these questions can be the basis for a very strong customer eco-responsibility strategy that can not only help customers with real business problems, but also be a basis for competitive differentiation.
