Global campaigns: HP and Dell competing for title of “greenest computer maker”
Opinion, Butler Group -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/25/2008 10:34:00 AM
For several years, Hewlett-Packard and Dell have battled fiercely for the top spot in the personal computer market, where HP currently holds a slight lead. Now these two industry giants are engaged in a war of words over which is the more environmentally friendly company.
This green marketing conflict began in 2006 when Dell announced a "plant a tree for me" campaign, and promptly proclaimed itself the environmental warrior of the IT community. The Dell campaign said that $6 per desktop would fund tree planting to cover the carbon emissions that the PC would generate over a typical three-year life span.
This announcement (plant a tree for me) irked HP, which has been following a corporate, social, and environmental responsibility (CSER) agenda for several years. This agenda has embedded global citizenship as one of the seven core elements in HP’s corporate objectives. It is also worth noting that HP has been recycling products since 1987; it developed the Designed for Environment (DfE) policy in 1992, and entered in to a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
However, the recent announcement from Dell stated that it had extended its leadership in global recycling, announcing that it is ahead of schedule to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 125 million kilograms of computer equipment by 2009. Not to be outdone, HP announced that it had recycled nearly 100 million kilograms of hardware and print cartridges globally in its fiscal year 2007, an increase of approximately 50 percent over the previous year and the equivalent of more than double the weight of the Titanic. Therefore, as we can see this war of words and deeds looks set to continue, and as people become increasingly familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint, then expect this to become even more personal in how it is improving your life. Although this posturing appears targeted at convincing the consumer that the vendor has valid 'green credentials' and they are not contributing to the problem of greenhouse gases (but are in fact part of the solution) it is at least driving the environmental debate and forcing other vendors to follow, which cannot be a bad thing. This is particularly relevant as we are likely to witness an increased demand for even small organizations to report on their carbon emissions, and if you consider that in the example above over the three years (if it was not switched off at evenings and weekends) the single PC would generate a total of 2,500kg of CO2 emissions. Therefore, any approach to raise the awareness must be applauded if it is helping us to reduce our own carbon footprint.
