HP - like many other global corporations - has established goals to reduce carbon emissions by billions of tons and recycle hundreds of millions of pounds of waste. Numbers like that are pretty hard to get your mind around. Take a company's environmental efforts down to a few people on the ground and it's comprehensible.
Erin Gately, environmental program manager for HP's
Imaging and Printing Group, is responsible for helping the company achieve those goals. She's also involved in some "on the ground" green efforts in Vancouver WA, where she's domiciled.
According to
an interview with The Columbian (Vancouver WA), Erin has a broad range of responsibilities including "make[ing] sure engineers use reused materials in the printers they make, keep energy use low, and ship printers in packages that can be easily recycled. She does it with very little travel, despite the global reach of the company, choosing to communicate electronically rather than burn carbon fuels to meet colleagues face-to-face."
Erin and HP's
Vancouver Sustainability Network of 170 employee volunteers have implemented a number of initiatives including:
- Making 45 organic plots available to employees
- improved the recycling offerings in HP's cafeteria
- Replaced disposable dishes and utensils in the cafeteria with ceramic and metal
- Sponsored fairs that educate workers about environmentalism
- Touted telecommuting while also encouraging those who do come to the office to ride a bike
On another note, HP's Vancouver solar panels had generated 231 kilowatt hours of electricity in the month of August, about one sixth of what it would take to power a typical house for a month.
So if your company isn't the size of HP - and not many are! - there are lots of things you can do to implement enviromental programs, from the ground up.
