You’ve heard about the cloud, right? This blog comes to you from the cloud. The cloud is where the bank keeps your money. YouTube, Gmail, Twitter and iTunes live in the cloud. So does a record of all my runs in 2011. The cloud, in essence, is the millions of data centers where information and software are stored and can be accessed by gazillions of computers.
Unfortunately, the cloud is creating problems for the planet.
Which bring us to Facebook and its coal problem. By some accounts, Facebook is the world’s most visited website. Greenpeace, as a result, has made Facebook the target of a campaign called Unfriend Coal, which has its own Facebook pages (of course!) with more than 700,000 fans. (Another 500,000 orFacebook recently opened a big new data center in Prineville, Oregon, where electricity is generated mostly from burning coal. Greenpeace is asking the social media giant to power its services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.
In response, Facebook–like the rest of the IT industry–mostly talks about efficiency. The Prineville data center is super efficient, by all accounts. What’s more, to its credit, Facebook is sharing much of what it has learned about making data centers more efficient in its Open Compute project.
The trouble is, efficiency is a necessary, but insufficient response to the threat of climate change. [click to continue…]
Inside every Hewlett Packard laptop, and perhaps others as well, I’m told, is a tiny device–a sensor–known as an accelerometer. It’s just what it sounds like, a way to measure acceleration. Should you accidentally drop your laptop, the sensor’s job is to protect the hard drive from damage by sending a signal to park the read/write head away from the drive. Amazing, no? (Please do not test this out at home.)
Jeff Wacker
I learned this today from Jeff Wacker, an HP Fellow, a researcher and a futurist, who came to Washington to talk to policy-makers and reporters about HP’s work on sensors, and how they will change the way we interact with the world. Sensors will, he argued, help conserve energy, improve traffic congestion, track food-borne illnesses, even save lives. HP is working on a project called CeNSE — the letters stand for Central Nervous System for the Earth — which is about communicating with all the stuff around us, as well as with the planet itself.
CeNSE, the company says, will “revolutionize human interaction with the earth as profoundly as the Internet has revolutionized personal and business interactions.” The idea behind CeNSE is also known as “the Internet of things.” (See The Internet of parking spaces.) IBM with its Smarter Planet efforts and Cisco, which has its own futurist who’s thinking about this interconnected world, both see the opportunity to develop the Internet of things as potentially huge. [click to continue…]
Hewlett Packard, the world’s biggest technology company, ships 3.5 products per second.* That’s a lot of printers, cartridges, computers, servers, handheld devices, etc. No tech company–not even Google–is more important to the health of the planet.
Fortunately, HP takes sustainability seriously. HP topped Newsweek’s environmental ranking of 500 big U.S. companies, as well as a similar (but less credible) list assembled by Corporate Responsibility magazine. It has set tough goals for itself around greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency of its products and recyling.
“It’s in our company’s DNA,” says Engelina Jaspers, HP’s vice president of environmental sustainability. “This has been underway for decades.”
Engelina Jaspers
Engelina has been the steward of HP’s environmental efforts for just about a year; she has been with HP for 12 years and before than worked for about 15 year at Eastman Kodak, mostly in sales and marketing. We had lunch today in Washington to talk a bit about where the company has come from, where it’s going and how an executive who commands just a handful of executives can help move a company that generated $115 billion in revenues last year.
She’s right about the company’s DNA. Despite some big-time stumbles in recent years–the embarrassing tenure of CEO Carly Fiorina and the even more embarrassing exit of CEO Mark Hurd–HP has been a model of corporate responsibility since it was started after World War II by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Their path-breaking “HP Way” corporate philosophy says, among other things, that companies need to be about something bigger than generating short-term profits. As a Stanford magazine profile put it:
“I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money,” Packard told an HP management training session in 1960. “While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we have to go deeper to find our real reason for being . . . . A group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company . . . to do something worthwhile — they make a contribution to society . . . . The real reason for our existence is that we provide something which is unique.”
HP, for example, was a pioneer in electronics. It built a recycling facility in Roseville, CA, (pictured above) in the mid-1990s, long before the rest of the electronics industry took recycling seriously. (See my 2007 FORTUNE story, The End of Garbage.) There, HP disassembles old computers and printers, and extracts valuable metals that, at least in theory, pay for the operation. “Things come in as e-waste,” Jaspers says. “They go out as commodities.” Even before that, HP recycled ink cartridges. Today, at a plant near Montreal operated with a partner called the Lavergne Group, HP is using a closed-loop plastic recycling system that incorporates post-consumer recycled plastics – from sources such as water bottles and ink cartridges – into the manufacture of new inkjet cartridges. Of course, as HP takes responsibility for its products at the end of their life, the company increasingly designs them in a way that makes it easier for products to be reused or recycled. HP has said it will use a total of 100 million pounds, cumulatively from 2007, of recycled plastic in HP printing products.
A target like that sound good, but it’s hard to know how meaningful it is, without context; it would be better for HP to commit to recycling a percentage (increasing annually) of all the electronics that it sells.
Other HP goals, fortunately, are more clear cut. The company says it will:
Reduce the energy consumption and associated GHG emissions of all our products to 40 percent below 2005 levels by the end of 2011.
Reduce GHG emissions from HP-owned and HP-leased facilities 20 percent under 2005 levels by 2013 on an absolute basis.
Meeting the greenhouse gas goal will be challenge, Jaspers told me, because it requires sharply reducing emissions even as the company keeps growing. Among other things, HP has installed solar panels on a facility in San Diego (through a deal with SunPower) and it built a super-efficient data center in Wynward in the UK. (See the video below for more.)
So how does Jaspers “manage” all this, along with the research into sustainability at HP Labs, the greening of HP’s supply chain, environmental reporting and marketing?
Actually, she doesn’t. She’s got a staff of just about 12 people and mostly operates by coordinating and cheerleading others in the HP ecosystem. A big goal for the year ahead, she told me, is “embedding sustainability even further into our organization, especially with the companies we’ve acquired.” In recent years, HP has bought 3Com, Palm and EDS. She’s bringing in outside environmental experts to talk to the top brass, among other things.
When I asked whether any of the top execs at HP has a special passion for sustainability, Jaspers told me, in effect, that it doesn’t really matter to her whether an executive loves to hike or has a personal commitment to green issues. Better, she said, to focus on the business case, on the way that sustainability can drive revenues, reduce costs or spark innovation.
“I want to be a business person first, who brings in sustainability as key tool,” she said.
“It’s not about getting your CEO passionate about sustainability,” she went on. “It’s about connecting sustainability to your CEO’s passion.”
Speaking of the CEO, HP’s environmental efforts conspicuously lacked visible support from the top when Hurd was in charge. IBM, Google and GE have all done a better job talking publicly about why sustainability matters. When HP gets a new CEO, it will be interesting to see if the company’s marketing around sustainability can become as good as its practices.
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*Not literally, of course–who would want 0.5 of a printer or computer?
Mark Hurd got off easy: Yes, by all accounts, he was a great CEO of Hewlett Packard and no, he may not have engaged in sexual harassment, but let’s focus for a moment on what he did.
The WSJ reported today that “the woman [HP contractor Jodie Fisher] was paid at times when there was no legitimate purpose.” In plain English, this means that he sent money to her that belongs to HP shareholders for work that she did not do. If true, this is clearly a firing offense. If it’s not fraud, then what is it?
The HP board, it seems to me, should have fired Hurd for cause and taken away his severance, which is being valued at about $35 million by The Journal.
As my friend Nell Minow, the corporate-governance expert and founder of The Corporate Library, tweeted the other day, linking to a column by Henry Blodget:
As for those who say Hurd will be hard to replace, well, if that’s indeed the case, that’s his fault. A key job of any CEO is to groom potential successors, and assemble a team that can keep a company running smoothly in his or her absence. It’s never a one-man show, and shouldn’t be. One measure of just how well Hurd led HP will be the company’s performance in the next couple of years.
A climate “Pearl Harbor”: Congress’s reluctance or inability to act to curb global warming has led some people, notably Joe Romm, to speculate about what it might take to spur action. Back in 2008, Romm listed a number of “climatic mini-catastrophes” that might move public and policymaker opinion, among them the Arctic going ice-free, a mega-drought hitting the American southwest, more super storms like Katrina and “a heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003.” I don’t know how the current Russian heat wave compares to the 2003 heat. But shouldn’t it be a wake-up call, if not a Pearl Harbor, when it comes to global warming?
For a detailed meteorological analysis, see Dr. Rob Carver’s blog at Weather Underground. Russian officials now say the heatwave has cost 5,000 lives as fires range out of control, says the Telegraph. Russia banned grain exports last week, with uncertain effects on world food prices. “Russian grain exports totaled 21.4 million metric tons last year, about 17 percent of the global grain trade,” The Times reported. What’s more, according to The Times’ Green blog, Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, blamed the crisis on climate change and called for action:
What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.
Unhappily, a crisis in Russia is highly unlikely to rouse the U.S. Senate to action. But imagine if this heat and drought were affecting wheat farmers in, say, Kansas and North Dakota?
Actually, even that might not have an impact. A poll released last week by the Shelton Group found that most people who doubt that climate change is occurring, and caused by man-made activity, would not change their mind even if reality of man-made global warming consumers would not change even if the polar ice cap melted, kids couldn’t go outside to play or shifting weather patterns turned Nebraska into a desert. My goodness.
But the good news is…that while Congress is stalled on the energy and climate front, and while consumers seem less engaged, companies are increasingly finding that sustainability is good for business. As my friend and colleague Joel Makower reports at GreenBiz.com:
The footwear and apparel industry has joined forces to create an Eco Index tool to better understand materials’ and products’ impacts….Meanwhile, appliance makers agreed last week to new energy and water efficiency standards for major appliances that will reduce the nation’s utility bills by billions of dollars. A new bartering exchange was launched to help small businesses with excess supply of goods or services barter for things they need. And John Finisdore writes of an effort by more than 200 companies to understand and manage their dependence and impact on ecosystem services.
I wrote about the outdoors industry initiative (See How ‘green’ are those hiking boots?) last week. You can read more about Timberland’s effort to develop standards for its products here.
Speaking of Greenbiz, later this month I will be leading an online conversation with John D. Gagel, Sustainability Manager at Lexmark International, and Daniel Schmid, Head of Sustainability Operations at SAP, about how sustainability initiatives can drive profitability. We’ll hear stories from Lexmark and SAP about tools and techniques for monitoring, measuring and reporting on corporate sustainability performance with an aim to driving financial returns. Greenbiz will host the free webcast on Tuesday, August 24, and it is likely to fill up fast, so register soon.
To save the planet, we need to take a handful of big steps, like regulating greenhouse gas emissions. We also need to take many, many small steps, like recycling, buying paper from sustainably-harvested forests and using less packaging. Last week’s high-profile defeat of the Lieberman-Warner bill to regulate greenhouse gases was a significant setback, a big step that won’t happen for at least another year.. So this posting will look at some small steps towards a cleaner planet that have not gotten as much attention.
We’ll start with Best Buy. Thanks in part to the work of an effective shareholder activist group called As You Sow, Best Buy announced last week that it will test a free recycling program that will offer consumers a convenient and safe way to get rid of old TVs, computers, cell phones and other unwanted gadgets. The trial will be offered at 177 Best Buy stores in eight states. The company already had an active recycling program, available when consumers bought a new product from Best Buy. The big change here is that Best Buy will take back e-waste that it did not sell.
Conrad McKerron, an activist with As You Sow, told me via email:
As You Sow has been in dialogue with Best Buy, the largest U.S. electronics retailer for several months, and filed a shareholder proposal with the company last fall asking it to look at using its stores for free take back of electronic waste, including TVs, and to partner with electronic manufacturers to develop a workable, convenient national collection system. We withdrew the proposal in exchange for an agreement by the company in April to develop a large scale pilot to test in-store recycling of electronics. They are now ready to roll out a pilot that will offer free take back of most consumer electronics, including TVs, at 117 of their stores in three areas – here in the SF Bay Area, Minneapolis and Baltimore. We believe this represents the first on-going large scale take back of consumer electronics offered by any major retail chain.
This is especially significant because of next February’s switchover from analog to digital TV broadcasting, which could render millions of old TVs obsolete. The ultimate goal—and we are gradually getting there—is for all manufacturers to assume responsibility for take-back all their products, as Dell and HP have for their hardware. (I recently shipped a couple of old printers back to BP, and the system worked well.) Sony’s the leader in the TV industry; its competitors have yet to come along. Best Buy could give them a push.
Speaking of HP, the company recently announced a comprehensive new paper-buying policy, developed in cooperation with NGOs Forest Ethics and World Wildlife Fund. We’ll spare you most of the (boring) details; suffice it to say that HP will set goals for all of its worldwide operations, maximize the use of recycled paper, give preference to papers certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and report publicly on all of this. The paper products covered under HP’s new policy amount to more than 300,000 tons, including its retail printing paper, all packaging, promotional materials, and internally used paper.
Will Craven of Forest Ethics tells me that a growing number of companies are taking responsibility for the environmental impact of the paper they use. Among them are Limited Brands (after an activist campaign targeting the Victoria’s Secret catalog), Patagonia, REI, Crate & Barrel, Williams-Sonoma, Timberland, Nordstrom’s, and LL Bean and Dell. Visit www.ForestEthics.org or www.catalogcutdown.org for more info.
Finally, Wal-Mart marked a milestone recently—it now sells only concentrated liquid laundry detergent in all of its U.S. and Canadian stores, having phased out those wasteful, oversized jugs of Tide, All and the like. Essentially, Wal-Mart muscled its suppliers to ship their detergent in more compact containers, saving water, plastic, shipping costs and shelf space (in the stores and in your laundry room). It’s part of the company’s ambitious goal to reduce the packaging (and waste) of everything it sells.
Since about 25% of all the liquid laundry detergent sold in the U.S. is sold at Wal-Mart stores—yes, the company is THAT big—this means the beginning of the end of those oversized containers.
I’m interviewing Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of sustainability, later this week at a conference called Greener By Design organized by my friend Joel Makower. After we talk, I’ll report back on other WMT initiatives aimed at reducing packaging and designing products with a lighter environment footprint.
Given the reach of Best Buy, HP and Wal-Mart, these aren’t really small steps—they’re major steps. But let me be clear: They are no substitute for the big steps, like climate-change legislation, that will be required to bring about the change we need, at the scale we need, in a hurry.
Which bring us to Facebook and its coal problem. By some accounts, Facebook is the world’s most visited website. Greenpeace, as a result, has made Facebook the target of a campaign called Unfriend Coal, which has its own Facebook pages (of course!) with more than 700,000 fans. (Another 500,000 orFacebook recently opened a big new data center in Prineville, Oregon, where electricity is generated mostly from burning coal. Greenpeace is asking the social media giant to power its services with renewable energy instead of coal and nuclear power.
