HP CLEANING UP IT's DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

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http://www.itpro.co.uk/616258/hp-cleaning-up-it-s-dirty-little-secret
HP CLEANING UP IT’s DIRTY LITTLE SECRET 
Matt Chapman talks to HP about its recycling efforts and how they have evolved since the early days.
IT
has a dirty little secret. Everyone seems to know that the airline
industry contributes two per cent of the world’s global greenhouse
gasses, but who makes up the rest?“The one thing that people don’t talk
about is that IT also contributes about two per cent,” admits Bruno
Zago, UK and Ireland environmental manager at HP. “The thing is, that
IT figure is set to rise. It’ll probably reach around four per cent
across the globe by 2020.”

Such an alarming figure isn’t going
unchecked by an industry that now finds itself fighting to conserve
materials, improve efficiency and recycle more of its products.“People
totally underestimate the amount this industry invests in research and
development pushing the boundaries forward. You’ve only really got to
look back a few years and see just how fast we’re printing now and how
much the quality has ramped up in such a short period of time. The
amount of investment that’s gone on there is staggering,” says Peter
Mayhew, director at Lyra Research.“It’s inevitable you now see that
coming out through environmental initiatives.”Zago says HP’s green
efforts began in 1992 when the company founded its Design For
Environment programme, appointing product stewards to work from an
environmental prospective. “Back in 1992 all the product designers were
going, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, nobody’s interested in that at the moment.
Get back in your box.’ But now the product stewards don’t have to go to
the product designers anymore because the designers go to them saying,
‘What have you got for me? How can I make this better?’” Zago
reveals.Zago claims HP has also expanded its environmental campaign in
other areas of its business. Improvements in the supply chain mean HP
knows where its notebooks are being shipped, cutting down two huge
manuals to one six-page booklet written in the local language.

Meanwhile,
laser ink cartridges have had their parts reduced by about 36 per cent,
using fewer types of plastic. HP’s latest laser jet printers also
require 15 per cent less energy to fuse the ink to the paper and the
cartridges are about nine per cent smaller by weight. Technology has
similarly been introduced to reduce wasted energy. “In a lot of our
competitors’ products the fusing unit just stays hot the whole time
because that’s the difficult piece in getting the first page out as
quick as possible. Using instant-on technology we reckon we’ve saved
around 6.5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions since its inception in 1993.
That probably doesn’t mean that much to you but it’s like taking 1.4
million American cars off the road,” Zago adds.

Dean Miller,
programme lead for worldwide inkjet supplies recycling at HP, says
innovation hasn’t always come easily. “There was no off-the-shelf
equipment available and there was no catalogue for this equipment. And
so we had to look to innovation from a number of areas,” Miller
says.“HP began taking back inkjet cartridges in 1997 and the manager I
work for today actually provided a washing machine that was used for
the first rinsing of recycled plastics. And the envelope removal
equipment that we are using in North America was developed out of
designs from the agriculture industries. We’re pulling off envelopes
using a similar method to the way corn is shucked in automated
corn-processing plants. The sorting in the US also uses an X-ray system
that came from the food industry.”Understandably, HP’s recycling
attempts took a slow but steady path towards the current plants based
around the world.

Miller says it took four years for the
development of the reclaimed PET plastic to reach a stage where in 2004
it could be integrated into the first product. However, that wasn’t
back into an inkjet cartridge. “The first product was a small internal
part on an HP scanner. It wasn’t until 2005 we got the first cartridge
qualified using the recycled PET material,” he reveals. Today’s
products have come a long way by comparison. “We’re not just taking the
plastic and reusing it and seeing the properties diminish over time,”
Miller adds. “Each time we create a new batch of material we bring the
properties back up to the original state. We’ve done studies up to
seven iterations and have seen no degradation whatsoever.” For all its
benefits, one of the quandaries the recycling process throws up is the
shipment of tonnes of cartridges and raw materials around the world.
Zago answers those concerns by saying the process is still in its
infancy and can be expanded in the future to cut down unnecessary
transportation.

“It goes to America today for the refining stage
but the plan is that once the volumes build up and we know what we’re
doing in terms of recycling and refinement then a refinement plant will
be opened in each region,” he claims.The very act of recycling
cartridges also throws up its own legal questions. “We can incentivise
consumers to return the cartridges on a temporary basis in some
countries,” explains Cristina Mannucci Benincasa, environmental
marketing manager for Imaging and Printing at HP in Europe, the Middle
East and Africa (EMEA). “Usually this is in the range of a couple of
Euros. It helps the customers become more conscious that these services
exist and it’s not possible in every country.”“One of the big problems
we have is around anti-competition law, because if we start to say
we’ll offer you money back for cartridges, we then start to be seen to
restrict companies that refill them,” adds Zago.

Joanna
Pupkowska, programme manager of imaging and hardcopy consumables at
analyst IDC, also noted that HP’s decision to recycle rather than
refill made sure cartridges were less likely to end up with
refillers.“HP is tapping into general worldwide trends when it comes to
environmental protection. On the other hand, the step that HP has taken
to be green and eco friendly in its manufacturing and recycling
processes helps them protect against the after market, meaning the
regeneration of cartridges,” she proposed.“So the supply of empties is
getting reduced on the market and it’s quite an efficient measure to
reduce the competition from regenerators.”However, Pupkowska believes
that both competing systems – refilling or recycling – have a similar
environmental impact. “Maybe with some succession that if empties
collected by other vendors do not qualify for remanufacturing after a
selection process they could end up as landfill,” she added.

With
all the talk of recycling versus remanufacturing, it’s a surprise that
HP hasn’t tried both options itself. “We have looked at refilling or
remanufacturing and I don’t know how much you know about those
processes but there are differences and I think so far we cannot
achieve the quality that our customers want by
refilling/remanufacturing,” Zago said.“It’s not something we’re not
going to do going forward but we will look at it again in the
future.”“I think that OEMs by the nature of their business model want
to go down the recycling route rather than a refilling/remanufacturing
route. It’s the whole razorblades business model,” concludes Lyra’s
Mayhew.“I think only time will tell, because if you look at the
opposite side of the coin and what re-manufacturers are doing to
communicate both their value and green credentials, then you’ll hear
some very strong arguments that are directly opposed to where the OEMs
sit. Whether those two cultures – and they almost are cultures – will
ever come together is an open question right now.”

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October 23, 2009 at 10:21 AM