Investing in Sustainable Solutions

Frances Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, where she is responsible for business development and oversees Corporate Social Responsibility programs nationally. With a focus on sustainable procurement, Frances is driving meaningful change cross-sector that supports a more circular and sustainable economic future for Canada. With more than 30 years of experience, Frances is recognized as one of Canada’s top sustainability professionals having received two Clean 50 awards, is listed on the Canadian Women in the IT Channel Hall of Fame and has led HP to become the most sustainable technology company in Canada.

1. What does innovation mean to you?

Simply put, innovation means solving the problems of people and the planet profitably. For HP, it is the engine driving us toward a circular economy, developing breakthrough technologies, business models, and practices that minimize resource consumption and drive towards a regenerative economy. It is at the heart of our Sustainable Impact journey. This journey is, however, rarely linear and is rather one of continuous improvement, where each solution – no matter how incremental – contributes to the collective effort of building a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable future for all.

“The betterment of our society is not a job to be left to a few. It is a responsibility to be shared by all.” —Dave Packard

2. How do you and your team generate new ideas?

As Canada’s most sustainable technology company, with the global goal of being the world’s most sustainable and just technology company, we are aiming high. Building on a legacy of 80 years of sustainability innovation and leadership, our team is focused on providing impactful solutions that drive business value and future-proof our business. We also extend our Sustainable Impact programming beyond HP to ensure maximum progress towards our ambitious goals of driving climate action, advancing human rights, and accelerating digital equity.

We begin by ensuring all employees are trained and retrained in sustainability so that they understand what HP’s ambitious goals are and how they can contribute. We encourage all employees to include a Sustainable Impact goal into their formal professional development goals. This way ideas can come from all levels of the organization. Combining this with an innovation culture and growth mindset is particularly powerful.

Our customers and partners are also key to our ideation strategy. We stay close to this community on current challenges, emerging opportunities and long-term, sustainable growth aspirations. There’s strong desire from our customers and partners for sustainable solutions and products – in fact, in 2023, revenue from sustainable products and solutions represented more than 60 per cent of total revenue (reported in accordance with the Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy) – and we are invested in helping these audiences achieve their own goals.

But this is not enough to address the many global problems, business as usual is not sustainable and we need to mobilize our full value chain. Simply put, sustainability is a team effort! This is one of the reasons why we announced HP Amplify Impact and new partner benefits to power partner growth through the HP Amplify Program, a global partner program designed to reward our partners for their performance, collaboration and capabilities. The latest announcements are a direct result of continued communication with our partners and customers to inform the direction and framework of the programs we offer based on their priorities.

By equipping our Amplify partners with the right skills and expertise, we’re unlocking new market opportunities and optimizing the customer experience in real time. Since the program launched in 2021, we have successfully equipped more than 40 per cent of eligible Amplify partners and their employees with the knowledge and tools needed to champion positive change across climate action, human rights, and digital equity strengthening our position as Canada’s most sustainable technology company

3. What rituals do you rely on to reset creativity?

It is important to find ways to reset your creativity and find inspiration in both professional and personal settings. Daily activities and frequent conversations, such as, reading widely and diversely, engaging with a large network of sustainability professionals, public speaking and teaching, mentoring others, and meeting with customers, all spark creative solutions on how to improve our services and offerings. Engaging in activities outside my professional craft is also valuable to allow time for reflection – this means stepping away from my computer to garden, cycle, swim or sail so that I can relax, reconnect with myself and my surroundings.

These strategies help me to expand my knowledge, get up-to-date mentoring, expose myself to new perspectives, challenge my assumptions, and improve my communication so that I can continue to create value and boost my impact as a sustainability professional.

4. Can you speak about HP Canada's initiatives towards achieving its goal of incorporating 30% post-consumer recycled content plastic across its personal systems and print product portfolio by 2025?

Transparency and accountability are critical to achieving any vision, but particularly in sustainability. How we do things is just as important as what we do, and this mindset has allowed us to grow into an industry leader when it comes to sustainability. High percentages of recycled content are part of our goal to achieve 75 per cent circularity for product and packaging by 2030 and with the circular economy being the only way that our society can reduce carbon and other emissions enough to give our kids a livable future, it is critical.

Accordingly, we are working hard and tracking our progress as detailed in our recently released 23rd annual Sustainable Impact Report. In 2023, we achieved 40 per cent circularity for products and packaging, by weight, and 18 per cent post-consumer recycled content plastic used across HP’s personal systems and print product portfolio.

Through our Formal Design for Sustainability Program, we are incorporating more recycled content and designing for longevity in our products. For example, our HP ENVY printer portfolio is the world’s first-in-class made with closed-loop recycled plastic from recycled printers and other electronics plastics – more than 20 per cent by weight. These printers use Original HP ink cartridges, which are made with 4 – 75 per cent post-consumer recycled content. In fact, we have used over 1 billion lbs of recycled materials in our products and packaging since 2019. This also includes Ocean Bound Plastics (OPB) much of which is reformulated in Canada and today is found in over 350 HP products representing over 182 million bottles diverted from the ocean.

5. How does HP Canada ensure the proper recycling and utilization of returned ink and toner cartridges through the HP Planet Partners Program?

Last year, we surpassed 1 billion cartridges that have been returned for recycling worldwide. The HP Planet Partners return and recycling program is over 30 years old and we continue to invest in its ease of use and results. Like all recycling programs it requires constant education, promotion and reinforcement.

I recently toured government customers and partners through our circular plastics plant in Montreal as a way of showing how important this work is. The recycled plastics produced in this plant have a 42 per cent lower carbon footprint than virgin plastics and some cartridges we calculate have circulated through the system over 10 times. Our award winning ocean bound plastics process impresses all stakeholders and is a great way to continue the story and incent customers to recycle.

We innovate with our partner Lavergne to advance the circular plastics process efficiency and quality and we work on new cartridge lines like the EvoCycle cartridges where HP’s manufacturing innovation has also produced a new hybrid toner cartridge that combines reused, recycled, and new components 3 to be the most sustainable cartridge in HP’s toner cartridge range 4 . HP EvoCycle cartridges contain only genuine HP components designed to meet HP’s specifications for print quality, reliability, and performance. Designed to help minimize resource consumption and to address growing sustainability legislation through using recycled materials, HP EvoCycle cartridges have at least 77 per cent less new plastic than standard HP Toner Cartridges.

As with all circular business models, front-end design is the key to a successful circularity program. If the goods are designed to be circular the results for recycling will be better.

HP customers have a variety of ways to return cartridges for free and our goal is to make it as convenient as possible. We partner with our full value chain to collect and return printing supplies. Once the supplies have been returned, we work with advanced recycling organizations to recover and recycle materials from empty or used HP printing supplies. Because of their construction, Original HP cartridges cannot be effectively recycled using conventional, commercial processes.

The ink and cartridges returned go through a multi-phase "closed-loop" recycling process. The recycled plastic from empty cartridges is then used to create new Original HP cartridges and other everyday products.

6. Could you provide more details about HP Canada's partnership with the Lavergne Group and how it has contributed to broader sustainability goals?

For more than two decades, HP and Montreal’s Lavergne Group have partnered to help innovate HP’s products to increase the use of post-consumer recycled plastics to lower impacts associated with raw materials extraction and drive a circular economy.

The award-winning partnership has spurred ground-breaking innovation through the development of a closed-loop recycled process that uses recycled plastic from HP ink cartridges and other sources of recycled plastic such as PET bottles and polypropylene-based clothing hangers, in the manufacturing of new HP ink cartridges, Through this program, HP has kept 830 million HP cartridges, 101 million apparel hangers, and 4.7 billion post-consumer plastic bottles out of landfills by upcycling materials for continued use.

Lavergne was also instrumental in our closed-loop cartridge system. By determining the optimal mix of recycled HP plastic and recycled bottle resins, they helped us develop the recycled plastic formulation (RPET) of our Original HP inkjet cartridges as well as identify the suite of additives needed to ensure that HP’s rigorous performance standards were met.

This partnership has enabled the Lavergne Group to demonstrate that closed-loop recycling can be done for high-tech products at scale. HP and Lavergne leveraged the learnings from the HP ink cartridge closed-loop recycling process to launch the world’s first in-class printers made from recycled printers and other electronics in 2017. These efforts and the strategic partnership enabled HP to set a goal to use 30 per cent postconsumer recycled content plastic across HP’s personal systems and print product portfolio by 2025 and reach 75 per cent circularity for products and packaging by 2030.

7. Can you speak about HP Canada's partnership with Choose Packaging, and how does the zero-plastic paper bottle align with HP's Sustainable Impact agenda?

In February 2022, HP acquired Choose Packaging – the inventor of the world’s only commercially available zero-plastic paper bottle. With the integration of Choose into our Personalization & 3D Printing business, we are able to scale our technology and customer footprint to expand the addressable market.

More than 150 million tons of single-use plastics are produced each year. Building on HP's 3D printing-enabled Molded Fiber solutions, the acquisition continues HP's efforts to disrupt the $10B sustainable packaging industry and expand our Sustainable Impact agenda. These efforts also support the growing customer demand for products and solutions that reduce environmental impacts without sacrificing quality and reliability.

8. How does HP Canada integrate 3D printing technology into its Molded Fiber solutions to reduce plastic packaging waste?

In 2021, HP started using a new Molded Fiber Tooling Solution which enables fast, enhanced design and fabrication of high-performance molded fiber tooling to create low-impact packaging in only two weeks, less than half the time experienced by customers using traditional methods. This facilitates the transition from using extended polystyrene to molded pulp for packaging. Our packaging is 100 per cent recyclable and sustainably sourced, while the molded fiber cushions are made from 100 per cent recycled wood fibre, bamboo and sugar cane fibers. HP scored an A rating for our forest disclosure with CDP and were the only PC & Print company to do so in 2023.

Combined with HP’s new tooling production service, its end-to-end solution delivers greater production efficiencies via increased production uptime, reduced maintenance, and mass customization capabilities. HP also offers take-back services and updates its recycling guide to help consumers divert waste. As we work towards our goal of eliminating 75 per cent of single-use plastic packaging by 2025, we are expanding the use of molded fiber packaging, which has reduced plastic foam usage by 253 per cent since 2019.

9. Looking to the future, how will HP Canada continue to be a leader in innovation?

Given the very short time frame that we have left to get global carbon emissions down significantly, HP will be keeping our proverbial foot to the pedal. We need to significantly pull our full value chain with us, and we will be pushing even harder for governments and our customers to implement sustainable procurement at scale. Dr. Bob Willard cites it as necessary to raise scoring of sustainability in RFX documents to at least 30 per cent (today in Canada, "even in the RFX document, it will usually be scored at much less than 5 per cent) to make it matter to suppliers.”

HP Canada’s work in many areas to advance the practice and implementation of sustainable procurement will, we believe, drive the innovation necessary for Canada to meet our climate and SDG (UN Sustainable Development Goals). We look forward to making sustainability a truly team sport where every one of the billion business decisions made each day in Canada truly consider sustainability as well as cost and effectiveness.