Name: Planet, Profit: Big Tech Turns Green
Uploaded: 2022-09-30
Duration: 12 min 38 s
Description: Hewlett-Packard plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2025, cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero by 2040. But how? Hear more about the tech sector’s pivotal role in fighting climate change, and how HP plans to meet its goals, plus why investing in sustainability makes good business sense in the long-term.

Hewlett-Packard plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2025, cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero by 2040. But how? Hear more about the tech sector’s pivotal role in fighting climate change, and how HP plans to meet its goals, plus why investing in sustainability makes good business sense in the long-term.

Planet, Profit: Big Tech Turns Green

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Hewlett-Packard plans to reach carbon neutrality by 2025, cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, and reach net-zero by 2040. But how? 

Silicon Valley stalwart HP has long been setting the pace in terms of sustainability. It was the first company to publish its comprehensive carbon footprint and the first to set carbon reduction goals across its direct and indirect operations and supply chain company ceo see sustainability as a competitive advantage and explains how HP is going about reaching its ambitious climate change targets. And I'm excited to also be featuring this interview at our upcoming global tech forum in Guangzhou china. So please welcome Enrique Loris, president and chief executive officer of HP inc and myself, I get to introduce myself. Um so Enrique thanks so much for joining us here um since you have been at this for so long, um you've also been tracking this for for quite a while longer than some other tech companies and one of the things that you've been measuring is actual revenue that you can contribute to your efforts on the impact side, largely sustainability. So tell us what the numbers show so far. Sorry, I thought it was controlled. So, again, you have you have full control here. All right, thank you. So, again, thank you for having me here. I think these numbers reflect how important sustainability is becoming for our customers. Our thesis has been for a long time that we needed to work on system with sustainability, both because it's the right thing to do because we want to have a positive impact in the planet, but also as you said, because this can be the source of competitive advantage because more and more, both our consumers and our business customers care about it. And last year we we did more than $3 billion because of sustainability. These are deals that we want because of our sustainability practices, our programs and initiatives and it's three times more than what we saw a year ago. So clearly reflects how the world is shifting and how sustainability is becoming more relevant. So talk a little bit more about why this is so core to H. P. You you have this phrase in your sustainability report, the sustainable impact is at the heart of H. P's business strategy. Um I know a lot of companies talk about this. What does it actually mean to HP and to you? I think this means that first of all, it's one of the top four objective for the company and the reason is what I mentioned before is the right thing to do for the world, but it's also going to be a very important competitive differentiator for the company. And when we say is really integrated in the company strategy means that it is not a separate strategy that a group is driving. We have embedded that in everything that we do when we design our products. When we think about what new business models we are going to create when we decide where our factories are going to be or how the factories will be built, every aspect of the business is now being redesigned with sustainability at one of the top priorities and really has a strong influence and help us to make to make much more progress and and each of your direct reports actually has sustainability targets as well. Right, This is something that we changed probably 23 years ago already because we thought that this was going to become a key differentiator. We needed to reflect that also in compensation. So all my directly, I had a specific sustainability goal that we review every year, we review every year the progress they have made and this has an influence under pay and their compensation. So is the best way to make sure that there is full accountability for those objectives in the company. Okay. And and let's let's give it a little bit to some of the challenges here with these very ambitious goals that you said, where do you currently have the most negative footprint on the product side? What what's, what are the, what are the hurdles here for you? Yeah, our goals are designed with very expanded vision of the company because we look at our community community where internally we need to make sure we operate that we would like to do, but we also look at the influence that we have both in our suppliers and our customers and influencing both is what is more difficult. We need to influence what materials our suppliers are using, what type of energy they are using. But also we need to design products in a way that will minimize the impact that our customers will have. So really extending our reach in these two directions is at the same time the most difficult. But it's also what is going to be more impactful because for example, we redesign the way customers use PC's and we helping to re utilize their computers more and more and use them for a longer period of time is a new way of using them. But the impact for example, will be much bigger And how so because you are part of such an extensive global ecosystem, how much of your emissions are actually in your control? What have you learned about doing this type of work when you've got such a massive ecosystem? If we design our control of what we do internally, it's a relatively small percentage is less than 20% of the total impact. This is why looking at the full ecosystem is a way to make sure that we maximize. the impact that we can have in the world. And this is why this is really where we are, where we are dedicating the majority of our energy because this is really where the impact can be much bigger um please, by the way, if you have any questions for enrique put them into the chat and we will get to them um talk a little bit about, you know, tech has been the tech industry is obviously part of the problem, but also part of the solution hopefully. And we talked in the earlier session about um, some of the investments and innovations on on that side. Um, how are you looking at technology as as part of the solution and what kind of innovations are you investing in as a, as a company? I really want to look at it as part of the solution as you are saying and things that we are doing for example is when we design new products, we look at the materials that we use and we make sure that they are recycled materials and today for example, more than 90% of the PCS that we build are using recyclable plastic. That's a very important number. When we look at we are the leaders in the printing industry and everybody associates printing with paper and paper with sustainable impact. We figured an initiative two years ago to drive reforestation related or linked to the consumption of paper in our printing. And we make sure that we invest significantly in reforestation to make sure that printing with hp printers becomes forest positive. That's a both important investment and an important initiative. We're also redesigning our business model to make sure that we, we use our products and on the supply side on the cardiac side we have a fully full closed loop model one supplies where we send the cartridge to customer, they send it back and we're recycle 100% of the cartridges if customers are used and join that program. So all over the company, we're looking at, what opportunities do we have to really minimize the impact. Have a positive impact, like in the case of forest and this is really driving a lot of investment on the positive side, it is really creating also a lot of energy with our employees and with our customers because they really want to participate in this type of initiatives. Working for a company that is having a positive impact, creates a lot of proud and really is a good way to motivate our employees but also to continue to attract top talent to the company. And is that, is that the case on a, on a global level? I mean, are you seeing that of greater or lesser importance in certain regions of the world? I think is the changes happening everywhere in the planet. There are some regions that are ahead, for example, the nordic countries, they are ahead, I would say than the rest, but we have seen the trend and the change happening everywhere, which is really helping us to continue to push ourselves to continue to improve because we have made progress but there is still much more work to do to get where we should be getting and we have a question here for you about some of the sustainability activities um initiatives at HP that are going beyond climate change. I know your, your, your annual report encompasses more than climate change. So can you briefly talk about what other sort of initiatives your Yes, we we have we are we have stretched our plan around the areas. One is climate change and sustainability. Second is about on digital or human rights and third is digital equity. On human rights were really focused on diversity and inclusion and we have very aggressive goals to improve diversity in the company, but also in all the companies that are doing business with us. And we have calls per year in terms of gender diversity or african american diversity in the US that we track again both internally in the company and with the company we do business. And the third initiative is around digital equity because of the products that we do computers And printers. We have seen the impact that this can have, for example, for kids that have access to them or not in a scenario where school schooling is happening remote. So we have a goal to impact more than 100 and 50 million people by the end of the decade, not only providing them access to technology, but showing them the value that technology can have in their life. And this is about providing access, but it's about training them, helping them to create new businesses, helping them to get access to jobs where techno, it is important and we have initiatives all over the world working with local organizations to to drive that. So we have a very comprehensive program which we really are very proud of, and again, we think it's going to help us to to have a competitive advantage versus other companies. So I think most of us uh in this, in this virtual room here would probably agree that that that all sounds like a really worthwhile initiatives here, um and and are impressed by the progress we heard earlier about some of the backlash to the the anti E S G uh sentiment and I'm sure this is something we'll be talking about more and more just really quick, you know, there are critics that say you're not doing enough, um and then there are obviously the critics on the anti E S G side, how do you like, do you know, you're doing the right thing when both sides are angry at you or how what do you what do you say? How do you respond? Yeah, we, first of all, we, we think this is really important and we want to have a positive impact in the world. And this is one the reason number one why we're doing this, we have defined aggressive goals for the year 2030 for 2014 and we are executing on the plans to together also, as I briefly mentioned before, this is a great way to continue to get get a great talent to the company and to the critics, I think, oh, this is something companies you should not be doing if getting talent is important for companies, this is something that really helps to move forward. And finally, as, as we also talk, this is having a positive impact in the results of the company Last year, more than $3 billion. The number is three x, what it was before, and we really think that this is going to be one of our competitive advantage is we all are very passionate about it and we are really driving it forward and we think is the right thing to do for the world and for the company. Alright, well, on that note, Enrique, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Thank you.