HP sets more ambitious environmental goals

MANILA, Philippines - HP products, particularly inkjet printers, now contain more recycled materials compared to units shipped two years ago. It was one of the various environmental goals that HP set last year for 2010 fruition, but has been exceeded a full year ahead of schedule.

With its green initiatives either on track or already met, HP this month unveiled new Eco Solutions and targets that would further reduce its environmental impact as a company and help its customers do the same.

For example, HP pledges that by 2011 it will use a total of 100 million pounds, cumulatively, of recycled plastic in its printing products. This, after it already exceeded its 2010 goal of tripling the amount of recycled content in its inkjet products and doubling the amount of recycled content used in inkjet cartridges.

A critical factor in realizing the latter is HP’s “closed loop” inkjet cartridge recycling process, which Ivy Liang, vice president for marketing of HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, said is the first and only one in the industry today.

HP has sold more than 400 million inkjet cartridges with the “closed loop” inkjet cartridge recycling process, allowing recycled plastic from empty cartridges, returned through the Planet Partners program, to be used in the manufacture of new HP cartridges.

“We look at energy efficiency, resource conservation and end-of-life as the framework for our Eco Solutions program,” said Liang in a conference call with the local IT media. “The long-term goal is to have environmental innovations to build a sustainable economy.”

By 2011 or sooner, HP also commits to reducing the average weight and amount of plastic used in printer packaging by 35 percent and 50 percent, respectively (relative to how it did things in 2005). Also, within two years, HP targets to utilize at least 35 percent recycled paper in cardboard packaging for printers.

Liang also shared that HP is currently only eight percent shy of its goal to improve the overall efficiency of HP ink and laser printing products by 40 percent by 2011 (relative to 2005).

According to HP, its business printers (ink and laser) use 50 percent less energy compared to the competition and that the HP Officejet Pro 8500 Premier All-in-One delivers 50 percent lower cost per page and 50 percent less energy consumption.

This year, all new inkjet printer models will also be qualified to have the Energy Star certification, which is a government-backed program that identifies businesses and products that help protect the environment through superior energy efficiency.

In 2008, HP shipped over 25 million Energy Star-qualified printers more than any other printer vendor, said Liang, adding that the Instant-on technology on HP LaserJet printers provides up to 50-percent energy savings over traditional fusing and has helped reduced 6.4 million tons of CO2 to date — the equivalent of removing nearly 1.4 million cars from the road for a year.

Meanwhile, HP customers need not only reduce, reuse, and recycle, but also calculate. The company’s extended Eco Solutions program now includes toolkits like the newly updated Carbon Footprint Calculator that customers can download for free and use to assess the environmental impact of HP printers against other printer brands. The online calculator could also provide information on how much could be saved using Smart Web Printing.

Challenges

HP is also pushing for commercial printers, especially newspaper outfits, to go digital. While many offices and homes now do digital printing of documents from digital files, they only represent less than 10 percent of the entire volume of printed paper in the world today. The rest of commercial printing is still done on analog/offset technology, which is far less efficient and environmentally sound as digital printing, Liang said.

Newspapers, magazines, books and other mass-produced printed materials represent over half of the volume of paper used in printing applications worldwide. Collectively, HP estimates offset printing generates a carbon footprint of an equivalent 850 million tons of CO2. Digitizing the bulk of the analog printing that still exists today would reduce the carbon footprint to an equivalent 251 million tons of CO2 by 2020, Liang said in her report.

In the meantime, HP has set a new challenge for itself: save one billion kWh of electricity by 2011 through a variety of product design strategies. With the amount of energy that HP expects to save from its PCs alone, 90,000 homes could be powered for an entire year, said Liang.

To date, HP has exceeded the energy consumption of its volume desktop and notebook PCs by 41 percent since 2005.

The HP Eco Solutions program touches the company’s entire range of products and services, and all new offerings will be designed to work in a low-carbon economy while remaining cost-effective, said Liang.

However, this may not immediately translate to lower costs for both HP and its customers.

“We are actually investing more resources and budget to reduce the environmental impact of our new products by implementing the closed-loop manufacturing process and using recycled components instead of virgin materials. As time goes by, we hope the program not only drives efficiency but also cheaper costs,” added Liang.