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The increase in the volume of recovered HP products accelerated in 2007, largely due to the implementation of the WEEE Directive in Europe. Volumes also grew in the Americas and Asia Pacific and Japan. The volume of recycled print cartridges was higher than in previous years, and the proportion of the materials recycled into new products also continued to rise. HP collected approximately 3 million hardware units weighing 28,500 tonnes (63 million pounds) for reuse and remarketing.
HP offers recycling services in 52 countries or territories, including seven added last year: Bulgaria, Colombia, Indonesia, Malta, Philippines, Romania and Turkey. Overall, we collected about 113,000 tonnes (250 million pounds) of products through those services, bringing the cumulative total of products HP has recycled since 1987 to more than 530,000 tonnes (1,170 million pounds). This exceeds our goal to recycle 1 billion pounds (450,000 tonnes) by the end of 2007. We have set a new recovery goal to double that total to 2 billion pounds by the end of 2010.
We also recovered more than 4,700 tonnes (10.4 million pounds) of plastics for recycling, some of which we used to make new print cartridges. In total, we used more than 2,300 tonnes (5 million pounds) of recycled plastic in our original HP inkjet cartridges in 2007, two-thirds more than in 2006. See the Materials section of this report for more information.
Including remarketed equipment, we achieved a total reuse and recycling rate in 2007 of 15 percent of relevant hardware sales.1 While this metric attempts to account for the time difference between when HP products are sold and returned, we recognize the difficulty of matching returned product to the appropriate sales period, which will affect the accuracy of the calculation. We prefer to focus on total volumes recovered, providing transparency of both recycling and reuse volumes.
Mixing recycling and reuse volumes also presents a challenge. Reused products and components have not yet reached the end of their useful lives, so including them can exaggerate the apparent impact of end-of-life programs.
The lighter weight of new products can be another source of confusion. If the volume of older recovered products is compared to the sales of new products designed with fewer and lighter materials, the ratio can suggest that a company's recycling rate is increasing.
We continue to believe direct comparisons of recycling volumes between companies provide the most meaningful measure of performance in this area.
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See the data dashboard for detailed
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1The recovery sales percentage is based on the following methodology:
- We calculate a ratio of the weights of hardware products returned for recycling against the weights of our product sales from seven years ago.
- We calculate a ratio of the weights of hardware products returned for reuse against the weights of our product sales from three years ago.
- The recycling and hardware refurbishment ratios are combined to provide an overall comparison to our product sales.
- Beginning this year, we have decided not to include recycled consumables in our recovery sales percentage, since our stakeholders are primarily concerned about the rate for hardware. We do not expect that this change will have a material impact on the results. We have also made changes to our calculation methodology to be more consistent with others in our industry.
2 Data for 2008-2010 will include reuse and recycling.
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