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HP offers a range of product recovery services around the world, including recycling services in 52 countries or territories worldwide. (See Programs) We focus on solutions designed to achieve continued growth in recovered volumes.
Our hardware return and recycling approach includes both product reuse and recycling. Reuse extends the life of equipment that satisfies our high quality and reliability standards and meets our customers’ needs. But eventually all IT equipment reaches the end of its useful life, and recycling services are then essential for responsible end-of-life management.
Our commitment is guided by these key principles:
- Accept our individual responsibility for product recovery
- Offer customers a choice of take-back options
- Provide global access to reuse and recycling services
- Follow a reuse-recycle-disposal hierarchy that prioritizes reuse and generates as much recycled material as possible when reuse is not a viable option
- Ensure compliance with HP reuse and recycling processes and standards
- Transparently report our progress
HP believes all manufacturers share with governments and customers the responsibility for treating IT products responsibly at the end of their useful life. We support the concept of individual producer responsibility (IPR) and holding producers responsible for recycling their own products after they have been collected.
Our print cartridge recycling program demonstrates the advantages of IPR in practice. We design HP print cartridges for easier recycling and provide a take-back program that ensures recycled materials meet our performance specifications for use in new cartridges. However, this is not always possible for all products. It is particularly difficult with hardware collection programs, which often take back various brands and types of equipment and require complicated sorting. In these cases, we support an approach to IPR that is based on producers accepting the financial responsibility for recycling their share of products in the recovery stream.
HP engages with governments to develop responsible legislation and directives for proper end-of-life management of products. HP has supported an IPR approach in the development of the European Union’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive as well as legislation in countries in North America and Asia.
We employ a hierarchy of reuse and recycling options that maximize value while minimizing environmental impact:
- Reuse of hardware products by others, including other businesses and consumers
- Reuse of components in used equipment and refurbished spare parts markets
- Recycling of materials into raw materials for use in new products
- Energy recovery—using the heat generated by burning materials that cannot be reused or recycled directly
- Responsible disposal
HP-approved recycling vendors process obsolete IT equipment and exhausted print cartridges that customers have returned through our take-back programs. The recyclers dismantle the recovered equipment and process components and materials to extract as much value as possible.
We require recycling vendors to meet our specific global recycling standards and policies as well as our general Supplier Code of Conduct. These standards and policies require vendors to store, handle and process equipment in ways that prevent the release of harmful substances and prohibit export of whole equipment or recovered materials without our approval. We monitor compliance through site audits.
HP is committed to transparent reporting of our performance with product recovery. We believe the most meaningful measure is the total volume of equipment diverted from landfills through our programs. That volume includes products returned for reuse and recycling, including both hardware and print cartridges. But since reuse is only a temporary measure, it is important to identify reuse and recycling volumes separately.
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