Leveraging Size & Scale to Effect Positive Change

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The path to market for today’s products and services is often circuitous, whether for a personal computer, Smart Grid solutions for utilities, or cockpit controls for the aviation industry. Multinational corporations, such as HP and GE, use global supply chains to source, create and deliver products and services efficiently. Many businesses, organizations and communities are touched across this global path to market, and the solutions that we deliver have an ongoing impact both during the productive life of products and after. Can the current model meet the needs of the booming world population—forecast to grow to more than 9 billion people by 2050—without exhausting the planet’s resources?

By applying the full weight of companies such as HP and GE, we can uniquely help the world transform how it lives, works and connects—moving us toward a low-carbon economy more quickly. Optimizing resources is one of the first steps to take—and information technology (IT) offers many solutions to reduce waste and increase efficiency across sectors as varied as energy, education and healthcare. Indeed, as we continue to transition from an analog to digital society, IT is becoming the underpinning of much of our daily lives. We are working with our partners to design and build intelligent infrastructures to reduce each of our company’s carbon intensity—and to ensure that the operations of our companies and those that we work with are sustainable.

HP follows a Design-for-Environment (DfE) model, in which the environmental performance of a product, process or facility is optimized. The three main elements are efficiency, materials innovation and recyclability. An example of efficiency is the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD). By using HP’s Advanced Metering Infrastructure system to monitor water consumption in real time, DWSD has increased the efficiency of its operations and given its customers a better picture of their water use so that they can conserve, as well. Such examples show that we are moving toward whole cities that are more intelligent and therefore more efficient.

We have also driven sustainability throughout our supply chain, which at approximately $68 billion is the largest in the IT industry. A supply chain is basically all of the parts, partners and processes that go into creating a product or service through delivery to the customer. In an effort to mitigate the effects of climate change, HP has publicly identified its tier-one suppliers (those that sell directly to us) and requested that they report greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

In 2009, HP began to encourage our tier-one suppliers to approach their own suppliers in a similar way. HP is currently working with other businesses in the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) to build a uniform online carbon reporting system and calculation methodology to ensure consistency among suppliers’ self-reported GHG emissions and to make the process an industry standard. We believe that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, so this is an important step.

The scale and complexity of multinational corporations is both a challenge and an opportunity for environmental sustainability. By taking the environment into account when designing our products, services and facilities, as well as working with our broader business ecosystem to become less carbon-intensive, HP and other multinational corporations can be catalysts for individuals, organizations and entire industries to be more sustainable, in the process accelerating our shift to a low-carbon economy.