HP Innovates to Make Our Customers, Products, Supply Chain, and Ourselves More Efficient

In January 2017 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that independent analyses conducted by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that 2016 was the warmest year on record globally and represented the third record year in a row. 

The release noted that the rise in temperature is being driven primarily by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the largest sources for GHG emissions in the U.S. are electricity production and energy use within industries. 

Sustainability = business success

At HP, we believe that efforts to reduce energy use and lower GHG emissions across our technology portfolio, operations, and supply chain are critical to our long-term business sustainability and our customers’ success. 

We know that electricity consumption represents approximately 70 percent of the GHG emissions associated with the use of our products. So improving the energy efficiency of those products can help reduce their environmental impact and lower our customers’ operating costs. 

Product energy efficiency is a critically important parameter that drives HP’s research and development activities and supports our Design for the Environment (DfE) program. Founded in 1992, our DfE program guides every aspect of product design and development, including efforts to reduce power consumption. 

The efforts have certainly paid off. In fact, since 2010, on average we have reduced the energy consumption of our personal system portfolio by 25 percent*, our HP LaserJet portfolio by 56 percent*, and our HP inkjet portfolio by 20 percent*.

Delivering an innovative product portfolio

And we continue to improve the energy efficiency of our product portfolio, without making tradeoffs on the design, quality, performance, or reliability our customers demand. 

The HP Elite Slice is a great example of those efforts. Introduced in 2016 for customers looking for a compact yet powerful desktop solution, this product is smaller in size compared to older ultra-slim desktop towers — and consumes 50 percent less energy than a comparable small form factor desktop*. 

Similarly, the new HP Z2 Mini G3 Workstation is a thinner and lighter system than traditional small form factor workstations and desktops — and it too is more energy efficient. Designed for computer aided design professionals, this system is over 50 percent smaller and up to 71 percent more energy efficient than the HP Z240 SFF Workstation and up to 50 percent more energy efficient than the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF*. 

Our design teams bring the same innovative spirit to improving the efficiency of our printing products. 

HP PageWide Technology represents one of those innovations — delivering groundbreaking improvements in the materials and energy efficiency of business, large-format, and web press printers. At the core of this technology is a page-width print head, which remains stationary while printing and prints entire pages in a single pass. According to a third-party analysis, business printers using this technology use at least 98 percent less energy than comparable laser printers*. 

We also extend energy efficiency with our service-based solutions, such as Managed Print Services, which is designed to help customers optimize, manage, and improve their printer fleets and digital workflows. This solution also reduces printing-related energy usage by up to 40 percent*, while decreasing imaging and printing costs by up to 30 percent*.

Setting industry standards

The success of almost any business strategy relies on the input of key stakeholders. And our energy efficiency work is no exception. 

That’s why we engage with industry bodies, governmental organizations, customers, suppliers, and public policy makers to help develop, contribute to, and advocate for standards that promote sustainability and energy efficiencies. 

For example, our product stewardship and R&D personnel have partnered with the EPA on its ENERGY STAR® certification program from its inception to develop program requirements for new products and to ensure that the program requirements reflect the evolution of technology. 

We also are a member of the working group developing eco-label criteria to reduce personal systems-related GHG emissions as part of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 1680.1 standard for computers and displays. And we support many third-party eco-label certification standards that recognize environmentally-preferable products, including Blue Angel, China State Environmental Protection Administration, EPEAT®, and Japan PC Green Label. 

Today, our personal systems portfolio includes more products independently certified to ENERGY STAR and EPEAT than any other major manufacturer.

In addition, we were one of the IT companies to take an active role in working with nonprofit environmental and consumer groups, utilities, and the California Energy Commission to help shape the newly adopted energy efficiency standards for computers and monitors sold in the state of California. According to the Commission, these mandatory state standards, the first of their kind in the U.S., could save California consumers an estimated $373 million annually.

Driving energy efficiency across the enterprise

While our products account for the majority of our carbon footprint, we also take action to improve energy efficiencies across our operations and supply chain. 

For example, we incorporate resource conservation into our day-to-day operations and new construction guidelines to help drive progress. One innovation was the implementation of a smart building project in Houston, Texas, in which we integrated fault detection and diagnostics software with the existing building automation system to identify equipment operating inefficiently and alert the maintenance team. The result of this work will be an estimated savings of 1.2 million kWh of energy per year. 

We also work to shift to less GHG-intensive energy sources. This is reflected in a pledge we made in 2016 to achieve 100 percent renewable electricity usage in our global operations. And it is supported by a new commitment we made in February 2017 to reduce the GHG emissions from our global operations by 25 percent by 2025, compared to 2015 levels. 

Within our supply chain, we partner with BSR, WWF China, and World Resources Institute, to bring the Energy Efficiency Program to suppliers in China and Southeast Asia. The program promotes energy efficiency initiatives and enables suppliers to share best practices for achieving energy efficiency improvements. The program has already helped more than 200 supplier sites cumulatively save more than 500 million kWh of electricity and an estimated $65 million. 

At HP, we believe that our actions can positively impact how we, our customers, and our partners do business. Through the efforts of our employees and partners, we are reinventing the way that our products work and our operations and supply chain are run to be more energy efficient — and ultimately — create a more sustainable world. 

*Additional substantiation details available at www.hp.com/go/journal_footnotes