„What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.”

Today is Blog Action Day for the environment and all bloggers around the globe are encouraged to post about this important topic. A group of three bloggers –Collis Ta'eed, Leo Babauta and Cyan Ta'eed – came up with the idea for this day and got organizations like the United Nations Environment Programme and Google to support the action.

HP certainly doesn’t want to miss this opportunity and so here is my contribution to Blog Action Day, for which over 15,000 bloggers have signed up.

Over the last couple of days I kept thinking about what to post today and I figured that rather than focusing on a specific environmental topic – you can find plenty of such entries in the environment section of this blog – I thought I’d write a few lines about HP’s environmental heritage.

I don’t know if you’ve seen our latest environment video, it gives a good insight of where we as a company are coming from. For example, in 1987, HP became the first computer manufacturer to offer end-of-life programs for unwanted computer hardware. Or in 1992, HP was one of the first computer manufacturers to sign partnership agreements with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to introduce PCs that can “power down” when not in use. It earned us the right to use the Energy Star eco-label.

We recently published a timeline of our environmental activities on our website. If you have a look at it, you will see that the timeline gets populated in the 1970s, starting with an entry about Glen Affleck who was named to the newly created post of environment control coordinator for HP.

Before that (although that’s not specifically listed on the timetable) environmental practices centred mainly around individual HP sites that were given autonomy to set their own environmental policies according to local issues and regulatory requirements.

Because of this, our environmental history is rich with individual contributions. From each facility and division, policies and best practices spread and were modified from site to site, eventually making their way up into the corporate structure, where the topic of environment shifted to corporate level practices and initiatives, particularly from 1990s to the present day.

Ulrike Haug

CSR Communications, HP EMEA