Environmental record




Dell committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from its global activities by 40% by 2015, with the 2008 fiscal year as the baseline year. It is listed in Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics that scores leading electronics manufacturers according to their policies on sustainability, climate and energy and how green their products are. In November 2011, Dell ranked 2nd out of 15 listed electronics makers (increasing its score to 5.1 from 4.9, which it gained in the previous ranking from October 2010).

Dell was the first company to publicly state a timeline for the elimination of toxic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs), which it planned to phase out by the end of 2009. It revised this commitment and now aims to remove toxics by the end of 2011 but only in its computing products. In March 2010, Greenpeace activists protested at Dell offices in Bangalore, Amsterdam and Copenhagen calling for Dell's founder and CEO Michael Dell to "drop the toxics" and claiming that Dell's aspiration to be 'the greenest technology company on the planet' was "hypocritical". Dell has launched its first products completely free of PVC and BFRs with the G-Series monitors (G2210 and G2410) in 2009.

In its 2012 report on progress relating to conflict minerals, the Enough Project rated Dell the eighth-highest of 24 consumer electronics companies.

Green initiativesedit

Dell became the first company in the information technology industry to establish a product-recycling goal (in 2004) and completed the implementation of its global consumer recycling-program in 2006. On February 6, 2007, the National Recycling Coalition awarded Dell its "Recycling Works" award for efforts to promote producer responsibility. On July 19, 2007, Dell announced that it had exceeded targets in working to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 275 million pounds of computer equipment by 2009. The company reported the recovery of 78 million pounds (nearly 40,000 tons) of IT equipment from customers in 2006, a 93-percent increase over 2005; and 12.4% of the equipment Dell sold seven years earlier.

On June 5, 2007, Dell set a goal of becoming the greenest technology company on Earth for the long term. The company launched a zero-carbon initiative that includes:

  1. reducing Dell's carbon intensity by 15 percent by 2012
  2. requiring primary suppliers to report carbon emissions data during quarterly business reviews
  3. partnering with customers to build the "greenest PC on the planet"
  4. expanding the company's carbon-offsetting program, "Plant a Tree for Me"

Dell reports its environmental performance in an annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report that follows the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) protocol. Dell's 2008 CSR report ranked as "Application Level B" as "checked by GRI".

The company aims to reduce its external environmental impact through an energy-efficient evolution of products, and also reduce its direct operational impact through energy-efficiency programs. Internal energy-efficiency programs reportedly save the company more than $3 million annually in energy-cost savings. The largest component of the company's internal energy-efficiency savings comes through PC power management: the company expects to save $1.8 million in energy costs through using specialized energy-management software on a network of 50,000 PCs.

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