How sustainable procurement drive a circular economy
hi francis it’s great to talk to you
i remember in a presentation that you
did you showed an image of 4.75 planets
and that depicted how many planets we
would need a year if
every country consumed the way canadians
did and you’re doing a lot of incredible
work
to change that so tell me more about it
sure well you’re absolutely right
uh if everybody was as wasteful as
canadians
we would need 4.75 planets to support
them
but of course we don’t have 4.75 planets
so that’s why we need to be thinking
about the circular economy
and in particular what’s wasteful is
when we
when we use the linear economy which is
how our system works
today so we dig something out of the
ground and
our extractive industries of farming and
mining
are responsible for 50 percent of the
world’s greenhouse gas emissions
and 80 percent of the species lost so we
dig this stuff out of the ground last
year was a hundred
billion tons of material we make
something out of it and we use it in
some cases for a very short period of
time like a plastic stir stick
and then we throw it back in a hole in
the ground and that’s very wasteful with
all those greenhouse gas emissions and
species impacts
um so what we’re trying to do is move to
a circular economy where if we dig
something out of the ground
we make something with it that lasts a
long time we use it for as long as
possible
before we eventually take it back and
recycle and put everything that was in
it
back into circulation again 100 billion
tons of materials wasted a year
and that’s a under the linear economy
which is very unsustainable
how else could the circular economy help
to fight climate change
well if you take an example of an
average pc if you can give
you know somebody buys a brand new pc
and they keep it for four years let’s
say
if they could give that pc two years of
extra life that would decrease the
carbon footprint by 30 percent
now that’s pretty cool doesn’t you have
to keep an older pc but there are lots
of people who could use a secondhand
or gently refurbished computer or any
other product
i use that example because we have the
footprint data but any other product
that you use
uh if you can keep it for longer keep it
in use as long as possible then make
sure it gets recycled responsibly we
canadians are really good at wish wish
cycling which is
hmm i’ve used this and i think it should
be recyclable but i’m not sure i’m going
to put it in the recycling bin anyway
and what you do is you ruin that batch
of recyclables so be very very sure
before you put something in the
recycling bin that is recyclable
um so how can a business like hp adopt
the
circular economy so we’ve made a
commitment to go entirely circular
and what we’re going to do is a whole
bunch of things and it starts with
design
designing your products to be offered as
a service
to be upgraded
to last longer to be more durable and
then when they do come back to make sure
that they are 100
recyclable but then you have to offer
the services that go with that so
changing from
selling products to selling services and
that sounds easy to do but it takes a
bit of
a bit of a a rethink of how you’re
running your business and then of course
we’ve made some commitments like uh 30
post consumer recycled plastics
across our entire product portfolio by
2025 which is a big deal
so how has unit hp after adopting a
circular economy
enable hp and its customers to
reduce its carbon footprint well
customers expect us to just take care of
it for them they don’t want to have to
think about this so
if you can come up with something like
instant ink which is a consumer home
printing solution for ink printing you
sign up to a subscription service so you
never have to go to the store again to
get your ink
you the the printer orders it when
you’re getting low it gets shipped to
you automatically in less packaging
uh in bigger cartridges and there’s a
bag in there for you to return the empty
ones to us so we can put those back into
our plastics recycling process and they
can keep going around so
when it’s easy for the customer and
cheaper
and more convenient and better for the
business and has a lower carbon
footprint that is the sweet spot for the
circular economy so we need to be
thinking about
maximum utilization of materials uh as
well as that end of life peace and
recycling that
canadians love so much what challenges
do you think business will need to
overcome
to attack the circular economy or to
go into a sustainable procurement
um so it is the procurement is the
signal into the marketplace
and today that is largely missing in
canada
for some reason i don’t really know why
canadians are doing a lot less
even though we think of ourselves as
being a more sustainable country we’re
doing a lot less in the procurement end
of things and
given that we only have 10 years to fix
or get climate change climate
catastrophe
under under control this is a
very critical lever that we have that
we’re not using to really address this
issue so
really focusing on how much carbon
you’re bringing in
to your organization how much you use
and then what you can do to mitigate
that
and how do you think an individual
consumer like myself can actually
contribute to
help businesses um adopt a circular
economy
or you know using a
sustainable procurement so it is about
thinking
the value the total value when you’re
buying something every dollar you spend
sends a signal into the marketplace and
it’s very tempting to buy
cheap disposable items but at the end of
the day
uh in my head i think of cheap
ultra convenient climate catastrophe
that’s how i think of it
and we laugh about it but that’s really
what you know that’s
buying with the cheapest thing we can
buy today
has led to a linear economy which is how
we’ve gotten into the mess that we’re in
i mean it’s not the only reason but it
it sends all the wrong signals to
anybody who’s making something so if we
want something that’s durable
repairable longer lasting we have to be
prepared to think about
buying it as a service which you know
will uh ease that
that price potential price increase but
uh thinking about all parts of the
product life cycle too not just
oh we get it in the door and we don’t
worry about what happens to it you know
technology is a very good example of
that because
we need to be concerned about data
privacy as well as environmental impacts
of
uh ender first life products