HP Recycles Products Nearly 250 million pounds

Nearly 113 million kg of products were re-cycled last year, a 50 per cent increase over HP’s 2006 recycled output.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced it recycled nearly 250 million pounds (113.3 million kg or 113,398 metric tonnes) of hardware and print cartridges globally in 2007. The weight of these is equivalent to more than twice that of the ill-fated cruise liner The Titanic.

HP said that the volume of recycled material in 2007 was an increase of approximately 50 per cent over 2006’s volume. It helped HP surpass its goal to recycle 1 billion pounds of technology equipment.

Out of the total 250 million pounds, HP recycled only 13 million pounds (5,897 metric tonnes) of equipment in the Asia Pacific region. The majority of the recycling was processed in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (170 million pounds) and in the Americas region (65 million pounds).

HP also re-used 65 million pounds of hardware to be refurbished for resale or donation, increasing its annual re-use rate by 30 per cent.

"HP set the most aggressive recovery goal in the IT industry and we’re on track to meet it," said Pat Tiernan, vice president, Corporate, Social and Environmental Responsibility, HP.

This environment-friendly news from HP comes on the back its recent announcement of an engineering breakthrough that enables the use of post-consumer recycled plastics in the production of new Original HP ink jet print cartridges.

Started in 1987, HP’s recycling programme now operates in more than 50 countries, regions and territories.

HP had announced its energy plans at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early this year. It committed itself to reduce the energy consumption across its entire line of personal computers by 25 per cent, within two years.

The PC manufacturer noted that it now leads the industry in the number of Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) Gold listed products with the introduction of more than two dozen PCs registered in North America at either the Gold or Silver rating levels.

In 2007, HP was the first PC manufacturer to register an EPEAT Gold product - the Compaq rp5700 Long Life cycle Business Desktop PC.

The EPEAT system is designed to help shoppers evaluate and compare desktop systems, laptops and monitors based on the products' environmental attributes.

In March 2007, HP tweaked three of its computers to meet the EPA’s new Energy Star standard. The HP Compaq dc5700, dc5750 and dc7700 were updated to help business users reduce energy costs, primarily by switching into sleep or idle modes sooner than current models and by using an 80 per cent efficient power supply instead of the current range of 65per cent-to-75per cent efficiency.

Source:cio-asia.com