In the backdrop of the recently concluded Climate Week, several companies pledged to implement measures to reduce their carbon footprint, improve energy efficiency, and other environmental measures. Among them, IT major Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced a major improvement in its environmental efforts.
HP has set a target to reduce the emissions intensity of its entire product portfolio by 40% by 2020 from 2010 levels. The company will aims to reduce emissions (in tonnes CO2 equivalent) produced per net revenue arising from the use of high-volume products that include computing devices, printers, and industry-standards servers.
HP now has targets to reduce its carbon footprint across all three of its business lines: operations, supply chain and product portfolio. The company already has a target to reduce emissions from its operations by 20% by 2020 from 2010 levels. The company also was the first in the IT industry to set a target to reduce emissions from first-tier manufacturing and product transportation.
While HP’s total emissions from operations have fallen significantly over the last few years, the company has been unable to reduce the emissions intensity. Between 2010 and 2013, the company managed to reduce its emissions from just above 2 million tonnes of CO2e to less than 1.8 million tonnes of CO2e, a reduction of over 11%; its emissions intensity, however, remained virtually unchanged.
Emissions from product use form the major portion of the company’s total emissions. In 2013, emissions from use of HP products generated an estimated 37.8 million tonnes of CO2e, almost 20% lower than the emissions reported in 2011.
HP has made significant strides in reducing its carbon footprint and increasing the use of clean energy over the past few years. In 2013, the company increased its in-house renewable energy capacity by about 18% to 2.4 MW (all solar power), and also reduced the electricity demand by 95 million kWh. By the end of this year, the company hopes to reach an installed renewable energy capacity of 6 MW to power its operations across India, Israel, Mexico and the United States.
HP has been recognised for its industry-leading green efforts. The company was one of the only 34 companies from S&P 500 to be featured in the Carbon Disclosure Project’s Climate Performance Leadership Index. It has also been recognised for the transparency in reporting climate-related information as it scored a perfect 100 score in the CDP S&P 500 Climate Change Report 2014.
Image credit: HP
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