PURPOSE, INC.

‍Participants:

Michael Young, Host

Ellen Jackowski, Global Head of Sustainability, Strategy and Innovation at HP, Inc.

Michael Young:

Welcome to the Purpose, Inc., the podcast where we discuss corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism. I'm your host, Michael Young.

My guest today is Ellen Jackowski, the global head of Sustainability, Strategy and Innovation at HP and in her role, Ellen drives sustainable impact strategy that focuses on people, planet and the communities that HP serves. And Ellen has oversight on integrating sustainability into how HP does business and that's a lot of what we talk about on today's podcast, in particular, ensuring that sustainability is core at everything that HP does within the business.

Ellen shares about what HP is doing in particular with regard to plastics and HP's plastics strategy how it reducing the amount of plastics in its products, how its substituting, recycling and significantly, how its helping take ocean-bound plastic waste out of that waste stream and recycling it and putting it back into its products.

I'm incredibly grateful to Ellen for coming on the podcast.

So, without further ado, my conversation with Ellen Jackowski of HP, Inc.

Ellen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Ellen Jackowski:

Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael Young:

So, maybe to start, could you give us a broad-brush survey of your role at HP and also how you and the company and the team there are approaching and thinking about corporate purpose and sustainability? So, pick at that any way you want.

Ellen Jackowski:

Sure. So, I'm Ellen Jackowski. I lead HP's sustainability strategy and programs across the company. So, that means I spend my time working with each of our business groups, our functions and our markets to figure out how to integrate sustainability more deeply into the business and this is something where we've seen really increased interest and demand from our customers as well as obviously the critical needs to fight climate change and address a lot of the environmental and social issues that we're all feeling globally. So, in terms of the question about HP's approach to purpose, our purpose as a company is to create technology that makes life better for everyone everywhere and sustainability is really built into that purpose, right? Making life better for everyone everywhere. Our commitment to that has been in our DNA from our founders in the very beginning and it only continues to get stronger every day. And I think even now in the context of COVID-19 and the pandemic that we're all facing, that purpose continues to be strong and we're thinking about all the ways that we can leverage technology and create it to make life better for everyone everywhere.

Michael Young:

Great. And one of the things we talked on the pre call or the prep call is about what HP is doing with regard to plastics in its products and reducing the amount of plastics that you use but also some of the work you're doing around reducing ocean-bound plastics. And so, can we get into that here?

Ellen Jackowski:

Sure. So, we have a plastic strategy. Obviously, HP uses a tremendous amount of that material. We make a lot of printers that are made out of plastic as well as PCs and gaming equipment and in our 3D printing business, we run plastic through our 3D printers. So, it's a very important material to us but it's one that we recognize we have a very serious responsibility to handle in the most responsible way. So, what's our plastic strategy? Point one is to eliminate it where possible. So, what does that mean? When we when we think about our printers, for example, how can we make them smaller or our PCs lighter? How can we change the parts to reduce the amount of plastic to just eliminate it where we don't need it? If we do need that part and if we do need that type of material, is there possibility to substitute it for a different type of material that might be more sustainable? So, for example, we've made lots of progress in our packaging where we've been able to substitute, for example, molded pulp where we used to use a plastic packaging product. Our third step in our plastic strategy is if we can't eliminate it and if we can't substitute it for an alternate material, can we replace virgin plastic with recycled plastic? And we've made great progress across our whole product portfolio both in our printing products and in our personal systems products to replace virgin with recycled content. We launched a product recently called the HP Tango Terra billed as the most sustainable home printing system in the world and that product is made with 30% recycled plastic. So, option four in our plastic strategy is to source that recycled plastic from a location with increased economic and social impact and that's really where the ocean-bound plastic comes into play into our strategy. We've found tremendous success where we think about our sourcing and procurement options and moving the sources of where we're purchasing that recycled material to locations like, for example, Haiti, an island nation where there's tremendous amount of plastic waste and with what we've been able to do there to commit to purchasing recycled plastic out of Haiti and hire collectors across the nation to pick up those plastic bottles that have been used before they flow into the ocean and acquire that material to recycle it, shred, it mix it with other recycled computer and printer parts to create new products. So, that's a high level overview of what we're doing.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. And could you say a bit more about that plant or that operation in Haiti and what you've done there?

Ellen Jackowski:

We started working in Haiti in 2016 and the idea stemmed from the work we were doing with our closed-loop process to create HP ink cartridges. We were already asking our customers to return HP's ink cartridges. For example, in the U.S., you can return them for free it retailers like Best Buy, Office Depot and many others or you can mail them back into HP free of charge. They go to our recycling center in Nashville in the U.S or around the world, they go to other locations where we disassemble that cartridge and remove each of those materials, end up with just the plastic cage that holds the ink. We shred that and we mix it with recycled bottle plastic to strengthen it back up, fill it with ink and then put it on the market as a new ink cartridge. So, we've been doing this for some time and HP sells a lot of ink cartridges. We were selling so many that we were using over a million recycled bottles a day to create our ink cartridges. And so, with that we had this opportunity, as I mentioned, around our procurement strategy to think about where could we purchase to have increasing environmental and social impact and that's where Haiti came into play. So, we launched the program and the intention to source ocean-bound plastic to put into our ink cartridges in 2016 and to date, we've used over 35 million bottles of ocean-bound plastic up-cycled into HP products. And that program has expanded over the years. It started just with the ink cartridges. Then the folks on our personal systems side of the business said hey, wait a minute, we love what is happening on the print side. We need to get into this too. Let's leverage our supply chain that we've started to build in Haiti and put that material into our computer products. So, we launched then the world's first display monitor that uses ocean-bound plastic. Then we launched the world's first notebook, the Elite Dragonfly that uses ocean-bound plastic in its speaker. Then we launched the world's first mobile workstation with ocean-bound plastic and just last week, we launched the world's first Chromebook with ocean-bound plastic. So, we continue to expand the use of that material. We five resins now that we've innovated that use it and have been able to find very practical product applications for it but also ensure at its end of life we can recycle it.

Michael Young:

Great. And you mentioned HP strategy and your move in this direction. How have you seen consumer and customer preferences changing for sustainable products? Obviously, that's true in clothing and food and lots of other categories, vehicles. But how do you tune into that and how do you help understand where consumers are going and how they're thinking?

Ellen Jackowski:

Well, we spend a lot of time on consumer insights but one of the best ways for us to tell how consumers feel about this is with their dollars and we track all of our enterprise RFPs and which customers are asking questions about sustainability and where does it make a difference in winning the deal. And this year in FY19, we've recorded $1.6 billion in revenue that we can attribute in part to our sustainability actions. That's up almost 70% year-over-year. So, our customers are voting with their dollars and they're saying we want more sustainable products. We're seeing that as well through the customer insights data that we collect. They really want to see us continue to reinvent for a circular economy. They want to see us use more recycled sustainable materials in our products and they're supporting us by choosing HP.

Michael Young:

Right. And in that enterprise sense. So, those are businesses saying as part of a procurement process, we want to know what HP is doing in sustainability and awarding on that basis.

Ellen Jackowski:

That's right. And a lot of them have specific criteria. They rely on various eco labels. The most kind of critical eco label that our customers look to is EPEAT and that's a strong eco label that's been around for quite some time and continues to strengthen its requirements. HP has more EPEAT gold products than anyone else in the industry and that's allowed us to make the recent announcement that we offer the world's most sustainable PC portfolio. And that's based on that EPEAT criteria that we know our customers require and are looking for when they're purchasing our products.

Michael Young:

Right. So, this connection between sustainability and business impact is real.

Ellen Jackowski:

Yeah. It's real and it's getting more real every day. And even in the current context with COVID-19, we're continuing to see increasing customer questions and pressure around what are we doing to make our products more sustainable. I think with people being at home more and the decreased kind of human activity on the planet while people are settled down and not traveling and focused on staying indoors and safe, they're seeing clear skies over Los Angeles and parts of China, they're seeing wildlife come out and they're seeing the positive benefit of reduced human activity on the planet. And the question is as we face the current threat with the pandemic, how do the lessons that we're learning here about human activity, what can we learn to help stem climate change?

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. And we are recording in the age of COVID so maybe it's always a topic of conversation. So, maybe just a few minutes on what you're seeing from where you said in terms of both positive outcomes that you've mentioned, short-term impacts, how are you adapting and evolving across the business and the portfolio to COVID?

Ellen Jackowski:

Well, obviously, this is an unprecedented situation for HP, for our employees, our customers and we're focused on handling the situation with urgency and a deep sense of care for our employees, our partners, our customers and their families. Their health and well-being is our number-one priority and we continue to take a wide range of actions across our business to make sure that people are safe. So, one of the ways that we're taking action is relevant to our 3D business. The importance and the flexibility of 3D printing has really come into play in providing solutions in this era with COVID. And to date, we've been able to produce more than a million printed parts of 3D products like face shields, face masks, respirator parts, ventilator parts, all sorts of different things to contribute to health and safety of frontline workers and folks who desperately need that equipment. We're also donating an estimated I think around $8 million to date in products and grants to support different learning activities and local communities who are impacted by COVID. We've launched several other programs, one called HP Turn to Learn which provides educational content focused on STEM and various environmental topics to title one school districts and underserved students in the U.S. And we've got another program called HP Refresh which provides free solutions that use technology and a community activation playbook to help get remote learning devices to students who need them. So, with folks learning more remotely and school closures, ensuring that there's equitable technology available in underserved communities is increasingly important and we've been able to provide some solutions and are going to continue to do that.

Michael Young:

Great. I want to maybe just loop back to 3D printing and there's always been a strong economic case for 3D printing because you don't have to move the part halfway across the world and if you only need ten, you can print ten. Talk a little more about kind of what this is meant in the current environment in terms of just the ability to stand up products quickly and are you seeing a lot of growth in that part of your business?

Ellen Jackowski:

Yeah. Well, what we've seen really is the flexibility that 3D printing allows. For example, if we think about the face mask or the face shield parts that we're able to print, first trial out, we printed and the healthcare workers are putting it on and they realize it doesn't fit right. We need an adjustment. Well, we just go back to the design file, quickly tweak it and print another one, right? Instead of months and samples and moldings and tooling equipment and all these other things, we're able to respond in the moment and print that part and upgrade it and update it based on customer and immediate feedback. It also can be printed more locally, right? Rther than relying on sophisticated supply chains and transportation networks. If there's a hospital near a 3D printer, we can print it right there and drive it on over. It doesn't have to get on a plane or a boat to get to the customer or the healthcare worker that needs it. So, I think in this situation, 3D printing has been able to offer incredible flexibility and speed of delivery as well as upgrades to trial prototypes that have been printed and then can be improved immediately. So, lots of possibilities with 3D printing. We know it's part of the fourth industrial revolution and the future of work and it's been a proud point for our company and our employees to be able to provide solutions for healthcare workers right now.

Michael Young:

Yeah. Great. And I did a podcast with Tom Szaky of TerraCycle who's definitely a pioneer in up-cycling and recycling at a much smaller scale. So, it's really great to hear a company like HP committing so deeply and so thoroughly across the business to the circular economy and embedding sustainability in the business and in the business model. That's really incredible to hear.

Ellen Jackowski:

Yeah. It's an amazing time to be at a company like HP when the world is in such a dramatic shift and we are in a position to provide solutions, solutions for students, for school systems, for parents, for companies to work more remotely using our collaboration tools and our technology and I know all of our employees and our leadership team are working really hard to deliver these innovations that are going to continue to protect people, communities and the planet for future generations.

Michael Young:

All right, Ellen. Thank you. We're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was really great to talk to you.

Ellen Jackowski:

Great. Thanks so much for having me, Michael.

Michael Young:

The Purpose, Inc. Podcast is a production of Actual Agency, helping innovators communicate in a changing world. More at www.Actual.Agency.

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