On World Environment Day, SPOI caught up with Rajeev Kapoor, India Vice President and CSR Champion – Dell and he told us of how Dell employees around the world support the company’s commitment to the environment by participating in clean-up activities and do their bit to raise awareness.
How is Dell committed to the environment?
As I look at it, CSR is something that is in the DNA of Dell. I am really proud of the fact that we have at Dell put across a 2020 Goal across various areas, right from sustainability, to education. We feel that it is our responsibility of how we create our products & solutions and sell them as well as how our team members contribute towards the environment. It was 2008 when Dell started using recycled plastics in our products. Again in 2013, we started using plastics from e-waste recovered via Dell’s recycling programs into new products and we scaled it across 90 products. We are on track to meet our goal of 2020 for about 100 million pounds of recycled products. In 2016 we again got motivated by the ocean plastic issue. In fact, Dell created a virtual reality experience called ‘Cry Out – The Lonely Whale Experience’ to connect more people with the cause and the issue that the oceans face. Again this year at CES in January, we have demonstrated our flagship award-winning product XPS 13 that is going to be shipped in ocean plastic packaging, the result of an innovative, commercial-scale pilot program. So there are lots of areas where Dell as a company demonstrate that the environment is at the center of a lot of things that we do.
Last year itself, our team had organized close to 50 ocean, river, and beach clean-up activities across the world. Then at our Dell Technologies World event this year, where we demonstrate our products and solutions, we decided to go plastic bottle free and so did away with 65,000 of plastic water bottles. As a next step, we also announced the convening of a consortium of companies that would come together in December this year to create a global supply chain and discuss the commercial usage of plastics. So these are some of the gestures that speak of our commitment towards the environment. This is a message given by Michael Dell that percolates down to every team member.
How do you mobilize the support of your employees to be a part of this drive?
We have got multiple employee resource groups (ERG) and one of the popular one is called Planet which is around environment and sustainability. A lot of our team members are connected to it and they keep on working on a lot of initiatives around it. There is one group around hiring differently-abled people and another one on women, called Women in Action. The Gen Next group is focused on exploring the younger generation workforce. These groups are voluntary but they are led by and sponsored by senior leaders and it is these groups that keep organizing events, activities and drive engagements across all the other groups.
Sustainability initiatives taken up by Dell
• 2008 -Dell started using post-consumer recycled plastics in its products
• 2013 -Dell started putting plastics from e-waste recovered via Dell’s recycling programs back into new products. Dell since scaled the initiative across 90 products on track to meet the 2020 goal of using 100 million pounds of recycled materials in products
• 2016 -Motivated by the ocean plastic issue, Dell produced a virtual reality experience called “Cry Out: The Lonely Whale Experience” to connect people more deeply with the oceans and the issues that it faces. You can download the mobile version here
• Over the last year, Dell teams organized more than 50 ocean and river clean ups around the world to support the company’s commitment
• In December, Dell announced the convening of NextWave, a consortium of companies coming together to create a global supply chain and commercial use-cases for plastic material bound for the ocean.
