How Printer Manufacturers Take a Stand at Environmental Consciousness

There is only one planet that we call home, and we must do everything we can to be able to continue living in it.  Part of our efforts should be choosing printer manufacturers that are serious about being environment-friendly and are actively promoting environmental consciousness through their products.

Three of the top printing manufacturers all over the world are Hewlett-Packard, Brother and Dell.  How do they fare when it comes to being environment-friendly?

Hewlett-Packard’s Global Citizenship Policy

As a company, Hewlett-Packard has formulated and embraced what it calls its global citizenship policy.  Through this policy, HP aims to reduce its impact on the planet by decreasing their energy and water consumption, by coming up with products that both meet Energy Star standards and are easily recyclable, and by educating the public about environmental consciousness through recycling.

HP also actively promotes recycling.  The computers produced by HP are 90% recyclable while the printers are 70% to 85% recyclable.  The company also has many drop-off points across the world to allow people to trade in their old HP machines or to have them recycled.  In addition, HP was able to recover five million pounds of plastic from old printer ink cartridges and reuse them.

The Brother Group’s Environment-Friendly Policies

The Brother Group has expressed support for the Kyoto Protocol and is actively promoting ways by which to reduce its carbon imprint and to produce products that are environment-friendly.  As part of its efforts, the company has implemented a 5R policy which involves:

- Refuse.  Avoiding the procurement of environmentally unsound materials as much as possible
- Reduce.  Decreasing the amount of waste produced in its operations
- Reuse.  Recovering waste material for use in other purposes
- Reform.  Reuse materials by making them take on another form
- Recycle.  Retrieve resources from reusable materials

Aside from manufacturing printers, brother ink cartridges and other machines that it believes would be fully recyclable after their end-of-life, the Brother Group also actively promotes recycling.  The company encourages its customers to send back used consumables such as toner cartridges to the Brother sales offices for recycling.

Dell Earth and ReGeneration

As part of its efforts to promote environmental consciousness, Dell has launched two programs called Dell Earth and ReGeneration.

Dell Earth encompasses the company’s policy to become an environment-friendly company, and it aims to be the greenest company on the planet.  The company has implemented its environment-friendly policies through finding ways to reduce the impact of its packaging systems, through encouraging its customers to recycle or donate their old technology, and through its “Plant a Tree for Me” program.

ReGeneration, on the other hand, is the movement started up by Dell to keep the public informed on environmental consciousness.  The blog itself is full of articles, tips and downloads on how to improve life by being environment-friendly.