Female1: Let’s get ourselves connected.
Female2: Got to get yourself connected.
Mike: One thing, most of us are trying to be environmentally responsible now, but when you look at manufacturer’s products, how do you know which company is being green and which one isn’t, to help us understand, we’ve got Frances Edmonds with us from HP. Thanks for joining us on the show.
Frances: You’re very welcome.
Mike: So I go in to a store and there’s all sorts of different claims about how green one product is over another. Like, how do you waved through all information and know what’s right and what’s not.
Frances: It’s very tough isn’t it, and I really sympathize with people who are trying to make the right decision, most customers we know today are interested in making the right decision. So HP has come up with a new solution, it’s called Ecohighlights, it’s a label that you will see actually on the box or our products that enable you to differentiate those products that have environmentally preferable features, like auto duplexing, like energy star qualified, those kind of features. Obviously it’s difficult because not all those features apply to every different product we make. So if it’s an inkjet cartridge for instance and it’s star qualified doesn’t relate, so you have to pick a different set of criteria, so. It’s a tough subject, but it’s one that we feel we’re doing a good job on.
Mike: Let’s talk about the packaging then of the products, obviously that’s a huge component of anything that you buy.
Frnaces: We have a number of different initiatives which we shown significant greenhouse gas reductions in, every time you make a change that makes your packaging small, you can get more per truck, which means that you’re transportation efficiency is much better, so, looking for packaging that has recycled content in it is a hundred percent recyclable itself, small, neat and obviously easy to recycle is a very important for packaging.
Mike: Let’s then talk about the supply chain as well, getting the printer from manufacturing to the store, I mean there’s a whole, you know, infrastructure there that people aren’t really aware of and how it impacts the environment.
Frances: Yes, and HP is doing a great job on a lot of our supply chain initiatives. We were the first people to disclose our factory locations, last year we’re the first company to actually calculated the greenhouse gas emission from our supply chain which is huge. And most companies are, have been started down on that path, if you haven’t measured it you can't do something about it.
Mike: Just going back to your saying you’re measuring the carbon footprint in your entire supply chain, why is that significant?
Martyn: Because it’s so big, we spend about 50 billion dollars a year building the products that our customers want to use and we’re not thinking about that part of the supply chain, we’re ignoring perhaps one of the bigger areas that we could have an impact on. When we look at the relative impact we can have, if we just focus on our own facilities like this one which we already done very minimal impact, next it would be our supply chain, big impact again and then how our customers use our products is probably the biggest impact that we can have which is why we have such a big focus on energy efficiency for instance, we have over a thousand patterns in energy efficiency, designing for our customers to be lowering their own environmental footprint.
Mike: Well thanks for coming on the show and explaining all of this to us.
Frances: You’re very welcome.
Mike: Frances Edmonds from HP.
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