The Financial Express
Corporates have adopted green for long. And now it’s time for consumers to embrace the environment. To help prevent your old gadgets from ending their life in a backyard-recycling unit and adding to pollution, Hewlett-Packard (HP) has extended its recycling programme in India beyond corporate customers to include consumers. Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific/Japan environmental director Jean-Claude Vanderstraeten points out India has an established collection system for gadgets, but needs “better dismantling processes”. Having tasted success in countries like Singapore, he is hoping to change the recovery process used in recycling electronics. In a conversation, he details environmental momentum, milestones and tech’s role in sustainability.
Excerpts:
During your interactions with Indian CIOs, do you find their perceptions of sustainability any different from other parts of the world?
I met 40 to 50 Indian CIOs during this trip to India. Most of them fully understand how green IT can help them reduce energy consumption and hence costs. While IT is only about 2% of a typical company’s overall costs, IT can contribute a lot in reducing costs of the 98% of the operations. This means that CIOs have a big role to play not only in reducing costs of their own IT platform, but also in the rest of the operations.
Companies have a great opportunity to cut energy consumption and hence cost of running a data centre. Data flows in from external sources and most of the equipments are not fully utilised. Utilisation factor of IT in a data centre is lower compared to, say, a production line or a call centre. This is mainly due to the fact that data centres have been designed to meet peak demand.
Several models are being tried out. Virtualisation, for one, is a big theme. The same server can be shared between applications and services. We have consolidated operations from 85 data centres to just six over a period of two to three years. CIOs understand the issues in data centre, but do not seem to be so well-prepared for environment outside the data centre. There is a fleet of products waiting for their attention. There is a series to tools to optimise your PCs and printers.
Has the slowdown impacted the pace of going green?
Slowdown has accelerated the green momentum. In this tough financial and economic environment, there is a stronger business case for reducing costs. So, everyone is focused on reducing energy costs. Any new initiative being considered today will be judged on how quick and high the returns on investments will be.
Have falling oil prices caused a setback to the momentum towards sustainability movement?
No, most companies have understood the benefits of sustaining environment. It is obvious that the consumption of IT will continue to grow and we will need curbs on growing costs despite falling energy prices. In UK, for instance, you can’t buy additional energy from the grid for a certain period of time. So, you are forced to explore other options. This realisation is growing deeper as 2012 Olympics come closer.
Moreover, there are constraints on physical space for equipments. From space perspective, cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo are expensive and companies can’t afford to rent out huge space for data centres.
We are convinced that it is not a trade-off between environment and profits. We’ll achieve better business results by achieving environment results. Take travel, for instance. By using video conferencing solutions like Halo, people are saving a lot of fuel and travel costs.
In India, you have been focused on corporates since 2003. What made you look at consumers now?
We started the environment journey with ourselves. Next came our corporate customers and in the third phase, we are offering these services to consumers. With technology products and consumer environmental awareness on the rise, there’s a greater urgency around disposing of equipment in an environmentally responsible manner.
HP has extended its recycling programme in India beyond corporate customers to include consumers and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Customers will be able to drop off HP-branded technology equipment at HP service centres in 17 locations across nine cities in India.
We will accept, at no additional charge, any HP printer, scanner, fax machine, notebook or desktop PC, monitor, handheld device, or camera and associated external components such as cables, mice and keyboards. After collection, we will consolidate the products and sort for recycling locally in India.
Are Indian consumers responding well to these recycling programmes?
Challenges are different in most Asian countries except Japan and Australia. In India, China and South East Asian countries, model is completely different. In these countries, infrastructure to collect used equipment is already in place. The problem is that these people don’t dispose off in a responsible way. They might return a little value to the customer but they don’t follow good recovery processes.
We need to educate the customer on the relative merits of getting a little money and ensuring safety. There is an opportunity for the formal sector to collaborate with the current process. They can collect and consolidate the products but there are challenges in how they dismantle the products and there could be potential danger to their employees.
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