HP Pledges to Slash Emissions 25 Percent by 2025

HP, Inc. is only one half of the former Hewlett-Packard Co., but it's still a global leader in the manufacture of personal computers and printers. And now the company will adopt what it describes as a significant plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 2015 levels by 2025.

The Palo-Alto based electronics company says its three-pronged approach to reducing its carbon footprint includes energy efficiency, onsite clean-energy installations, and the purchase or generation of offsite renewables.

Although the $57 billion company does not use the term outright, its approach toward sustainability and energy efficiency can be described as holistic.

HP’s most recent sustainability report claims it is inching closer to a circular economy, which includes the offering of more products as a service, product reuse and refurbishment programs, and an improvement in materials recovery and reuse. And HP says those efforts resulted in an 11 percent decrease in its carbon footprint as well as a 12 percent decrease in water consumption during 2015. (When compared to the legacy Hewlett-Packard's 2014 metrics, the new HP Inc. estimates that it is three-quarters the size of the original company before it was split in two.)

HP’s announcement comes shortly after it reached its supply chain and operational greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets five years earlier than originally planned. Across its supply chain, HP said it cut the emissions impact of minerals extraction through manufacturing by over 16 million metric tons. On the operations side, the company says it eliminated 900,000 metric tons of emissions just by encouraging employees to work from home, to participate in carpooling or to use alternate forms of transportation.

Additionally, HP plans to forge a deforestation-free supply chain by 2020 while it closely works with environmental NGOs such as WWF. As far as the alignment with sustainability standards, the company is working with the Forest Stewardship Council on paper products while scoring a perfect 100 from CDP on climate disclosures.

Trying to designate the world’s most sustainable technology firm is a risky venture, as companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple can all insist they have vastly improved their environmental performance in recent years. Nevertheless, Hewlett-Packard, and now HP Inc., have claimed a bevy of firsts. The Silicon Valley giant says it is the first company within the tech sector to publish its complete water and carbon footprints as well as having taken the earliest steps to establish greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets across its entire value chain.

And when it comes to human rights and the social side of sustainability, HP Inc. has also set the bar fairly high. It has welcomed the LGBT community for years, having earned a 100 percent score from the Human Rights Campaign for 13 consecutive years. The company also says it was the first among its peers to establish a supplier code of conduct in order to improve the treatment of student and foreign migrant workers across its supply chain.

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