How do Hewlett-Packard’s corporate policies help achieve Environmental Sustainability?

Environmental Sustainability is one of the most important topics in the world today. The future of the environment is important for everyone and as such has generated a large amount of interest from governments, organisations, companies and corporations and the press. Because of this large amount of interest and the social capital behind measures aimed at increasing Environmental Sustainability, many large companies are finding it beneficial to be seen to carrying out these measures.

An example of such a company, and the one which this coursework is carried out upon, is Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest Information Technology supplier. Hewlett-Packard (hereon referred to as HP) have one of the most comprehensive and detailed Environmental Sustainability policies in the Information Technology sector. But what are these policies and what are the problems that these policies hope to address? The purpose of this project is to find out the answers to these questions, describe in detail the problems that are caused by certain parts of the Information Technology sector and attempt to evaluate how HP’s policies are attempting to change this situation.

Information Technology is one of the most readily used examples of an industry that is damaging the environment in the world today. This is for a multitude of reasons, including the large amount of energy that some Information Technology equipment consumes, the dangerous chemicals used in the manufacturing of some Information Technology products, the difficulty of disposing of some Information Technology products and their packaging, and the large amount of resources and energy used during manufacture. All these factors may lead to dangerous chemicals making their way into the environment or adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, contributing to the global warming problem.

These issues are all personally relevant to me and my course. As a heavy user of Information Technology equipment, including some supplied by HP, I would like to know the decisions and policy behind making the equipment I use, for both work and leisure, as Environmentally Sustainable as it can be. This is especially important in the field of Computer Networking, as the large amount of computers and other equipment used in common networking situations, such as data centres, is considerable.

To find out more about this subject, I plan to conduct exploratory research using several secondary research sources. To find out HP’s corporate policies on the subject at hand I shall use their corporate website, specifically the Environmental Sustainability section, located at http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/index.html, which contains a variety of data, reports and written information on the various aspects of HP’s policies. To research more into the individual environmental issues addressed by the policies, I shall use various websites, most notably Wikipedia, located at http://www.wikipedia.org. However, I shall endeavour to check any information found via Wikipedia against another secondary source in order to verify the information’s content.

Preliminary research has identified several websites which may be useful for the gathering of secondary source information: