We recently conducted an Environment Ideas Campaign to encourage our employees worldwide to submit their ideas how HP could reduce its environmental impact through our operations and products, with the objective to select and implement the best ideas globally.

HP is the world’s largest IT company and this means we have a big responsibility to be a leader in reducing our impact on the environment. We have a long history of CSR and environmental best practices which are only possible with the active support of our employees. Our employees are one of our most important assets. Only with their help can we make a difference to the environment in which we operate.

The Environment Ideas Campaign acknowledges best practices and innovative ideas from our employees. They are the ones who are talking to our customers and are being challenged with environmental topics both at work and at home. My colleague Rita Sully talks also about the Campaign on her blog.

I was really exited about this contest and am looking forward to seeing some of our employees’ thoughts and ideas being implemented. I was particularly interested to see how diverse the entries from the different parts of the world might be since the environmental priorities and top issues differ between continents and countries.

Recently the Top 40 ideas were published and I was happy to see that over 2,600 ideas were submitted within only a few weeks. The ideas were quite diverse, focusing on product innovation, behavioral change of employees and customers as well as ideas for new awareness initiatives. For example a colleague from India suggests to use darker colors in presentations since light colors like white or yellow use more energy. Another colleague suggested to start competitions between the country subsidiaries of HP for the best country environment performance. I could continue and cite many other ideas.

In addition, some colleagues shared best practices that they had already implemented. A colleague in France shared how he and his team consolidated legal documentation that is shipped with each notebook. They consolidated the material from two brochures to just one which resulted in saving 1800t of paper per year that did not have to be shipped. This is equivalent to the cargo weight of 16 jumbo jets.

Employee ideas and best practices count a lot for us and I am delighted to see that our employees use their voice in this idea competition.

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Corporate Affairs, HP EMEA