Reduce environmental footprints through sustainable innovation

From circularity to net positive, business partnerships are adopting modern concepts to design and deploy eco-friendly devices

Your smartphone is wonderful. Its carbon footprint is not. Eco-friendly device design and lifecycle maintenance can help reduce IT emissions, but that’s just the beginning.
Slashing the impact of our hardware will take commitment, creativity, and collaboration.
That spirit of cooperation was palpable throughout Capgemini’s Business to Climate Connect, part of Climate Week NYC 2024 – perhaps nowhere more so than during the panel “Disrupting sustainable innovation.”
The discussion moderator, Franco Amalfi, directs strategic initiatives and partnerships for sustainability in North America at Capgemini. He felt inspired by recent C-suite responses to questions in Capgemini’s 2024 A world in balance survey.
From 2022 to 2024, the number of executives saying eco-design is a focus for product development went from 51 to 71 percent, and those pointing to circularity as a key goal for the business increased from 54 to 75 percent.
The panelists echoed this sentiment, explaining how they are implementing sustainable working practices in device management.

HP’s legacy of environmental stewardship lives on

Although sustainability is in the spotlight today, it has been central to HP’s mission since its founding more than 80 years ago. The company’s first set of corporate objectives back in 1957 included good citizenship by contributing to the surrounding environment.
Mary Curtiss, Head of Innovation Advisory at HP, is upholding this tradition by spearheading the launch of a sustainable IT consulting practice. She is dedicated to reducing the environmental footprint of their technology and solutions by educating and collaborating with coworkers, partners, and customers.
HP trains its salespeople on sustainability topics, so they can discuss the benefits and become ambassadors for the company, she said.
“Sustainability doesn’t have a limit to the job titles,” Curtiss said. “We really believe it’s everyone’s job.”
This effort does not go unnoticed. CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project, has given triple A ratings to HP multiple times for transparency and action on climate, forests, and water security.

The circular economy: Refurbishing and recycling devices

One of HP’s most ambitious goals is achieving 75 percent circularity in its products, but the biggest headwind is getting those devices back from customers: less than 10 percent of devices are recycled.

To extend product lifecycles, HP launched the Renew program, which refurbishes hardware to strict quality standards. Each refurbished laptop decreases that device’s carbon emissions by 40 percent.
Capgemini, one of the first companies to adopt Renew, has pledged to become carbon neutral in its own operations by 2025 and across its supply chain by 2030, and net zero by 2040. HP’s program is helping Capgemini move toward these environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
“We don’t need to buy a new PC every time,” Capgemini’s Amalfi said. “We can actually reuse one that has been renewed to the point where it actually works reliably, and it lets us do our work.”

The power of partnerships: HP and Capgemini’s shared values

Greg Bentham, Vice President and Head of Sustainable Technology at Capgemini, acknowledged that 44 percent of the company’s emissions come from purchased services and the supplier ecosystem. Therefore, reducing emissions needs to happen in partnership with customers, employees, and stakeholders.

Since HP shares Capgemini’s values, Bentham knows each device was sustainably designed, reducing resource consumption and waste.
Meanwhile, Capgemini has helped HP transform its sales platform and associated processes, and built a scalable, cloud-based system using big data that supports its ESG reporting.
The mutually beneficial partnership makes each more sustainable.

Net-positive thinking: Empowering rising tech leaders

The concept of net positive is to contribute more to society, the environment, and the economy than one takes.
It served as the inspiration for Capgemini’s work with the Hispanic Technology Executive Council (HITEC), a global leadership organization.
HITEC’s Emerging Executive Program, run in conjunction with Capgemini, trains Hispanic technology professionals to become the corporate executives of tomorrow.  
Fernando Rosario, President of Exeqpath and Executive Coach at HITECH, said the program teaches leaders across sectors to think of new and innovative ways to implement sustainable methodologies, which includes hardware maintenance, throughout their organizations.
“The whole program has been based on workshops so we can learn, exercises, [and on] research and development, using different platforms,” Rosario said. “[This extends] all the way to telling the story – not only within the cohort, but to their organizations, and out to the world.”
This partnership is dedicated to thinking beyond net zero and making the world measurably better in a variety of ways.

Generative AI: Creating action plans for impact

The HITEC program’s participants relied on Taza, a sustainable-intelligence platform powered by AI, to analyze vast amounts of data and propose actionable steps to their organizations for achieving ESG goals.
Taza is dedicated to translating well-intentioned pledges into results via explicit plans. Founder Mary Wilson said seeing how HITEC and others use its net-positive reports informs how her team iterates upon the existing product.
“What happens to this information as we get it out there? As we make it accessible? What do people do with it?” Wilson said. “And how do we improve that process to make it even more insightful?”
According to Wilson, Taza taps into the amazing breadth and depth of sustainability resources available to organizations. When a client onboards, Taza quickly identifies which of its already-mapped 519 use cases and 84,000 solutions are most relevant and provides an action-items checklist, removing much of the complexity.

Moving forward, together

Throughout the panel, the speakers reiterated that ESG goals cannot be reached in siloes. Sustainability cannot be relegated to one team – nor a single company. Just like the climate, our responsibility is shared.

“By pooling resources, knowledge, and expertise, these partnerships enhance creativity and accelerate the implementation of effective solutions,” Amalfi said. “This multi-stakeholder approach fosters exchanges of ideas and best practices, ultimately enabling systematic change.”
Partnerships like HP and Capgemini or HITEC and Taza demonstrate that each organization can drive its own sustainability transition while accelerating the goals of other companies. When it comes to reducing the emissions associated with our devices, we can’t do it alone. The future of sustainable hardware will be a team effort.