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Shipping over a million HP products around the world each day requires large amounts of fossil fuels. We aim to make significant strides in cutting energy use and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) and other air emissions by shifting product transport to more efficient methods, optimizing our distribution network, and improving the utilization of individual pallets, containers and trucks.
Most of our computer and imaging products are assembled in Asia, while a large portion of sales are in Europe and the Americas. We transport these products by air and ocean from Asia to regional distribution centers, and then by truck or rail to their final destinations. In some cases, we bypass our distribution centers and ship directly to our customers. To reduce cost, we are continually converting shipments from air to ocean throughout our global supply chain.
We are currently unable to measure logistics GHG emissions directly because we rely on third parties rather than having our own transport fleet, but we are working with our service providers to develop an accurate understanding of their impact.
We estimate that transporting HP’s products creates roughly 2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions a year, which exceeds the emissions related to operating our facilities. Most of these emissions are from international air freight, while roughly 25 percent is from road transport and parcel freight. Although we use ocean transport extensively, we estimate it produces less than 5 percent of our total emissions from logistics, because of its excellent energy efficiency. In fact, each tonne of freight transported by ocean produces only about 1/50th of the CO2e from air freight.1
Our strategy to reduce GHG emissions from logistics focuses on “modal shifts” from air to ocean and road to rail, and on improving loading efficiency. Other initiatives include:
- Optimizing our distribution network to decrease the distance from distribution centers to our resellers.
- Converting to plastic pallets that are less than a quarter the weight of wood pallets, which lowers the energy to transport them. This move resulted in saving 7,000 tonnes of CO2e associated with notebook and camera shipments from Asia to Europe in 2007.
HP has been shifting notebook PC transport from air to ocean freight. Each notebook PC shipped by ocean instead of air reduces GHG emissions by about 6 kg of CO2e. This means that each cargo container saves the equivalent of the emissions of an average car driving 100,000 km. HP shifted more than 250 containers of notebook computers last year, saving approximately 4,000 tonnes of CO2e.2
In the United States, we‘re increasing the use of rail to deliver products from our distribution centers to resellers, reducing both GHG emissions and costs. We estimate this switch reduced emissions by 3,500 tonnes CO2e in 2007. Our goal is to use rail for 21 percent of the total transportation for our imaging and printing products in North America in 2008, an increase from 17 percent today.
Through our Design for Logistics program, we develop more energy-efficient methods to transport our products, such as improving the utilization of individual pallets, containers and trucks.
In 2007, we completed a project to increase the utilization of pallets of notebook PCs air-shipped from China. We reduced the size and weight of each notebook box by decreasing internal packaging and reference materials. Improved design also reduced the weight and size of the product. We’ve reduced the weight of each boxed product 8 percent which enables us to fit 25 percent more on each pallet. These changes will eliminate 29,000 tonnes of CO2e annually from this one project alone, while reducing costs.
See Packaging for more examples of improvement in this area.
In May 2007, HP joined the SmartWaySM program, a voluntary partnership between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. freight industry that targets reductions in fuel consumption, GHG emissions and other air emissions. By 2010, the EPA expects to remove at least 33 million tonnes of CO2e emissions a year via this program. HP is encouraging all of its logistics service providers in the United States to join SmartWay. As of February 2008, 77 percent have joined—our goal is to have 85 percent of our service providers signed up by October 2008.
We estimate that the projects in 2007 described above reduced GHG emissions by more than 36,000 tonnes. We anticipate that GHG savings will accelerate in the future as additional projects are developed and implemented.
In 2008, HP will continue to convert shipments to more cost effective modes of transportation with lower environmental impact, implement strategic distribution hubs to reduce distance traveled, utilize enhanced packaging and palletization processes, and collaborate with our major global service providers to report on the GHG emissions for the freight they transport on HP's behalf.
1According to the World Resources Institute GHG Protocol.
2 Based on Bilan Carbon Method – a French translation of the GHG Protocol.
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