Dell's Oliver Campbell walks you through Dell's new packaging initiative to make our products even more green.

Transcript

Hi.  Thank you for joining me today.  I’m Oliver Campbell, Senior Manager, Global Packaging Engineering at Dell. 

We’re here to talk about a new initiative we have in packaging which we call our three C’s, for cube, content and curb.  So what it’s about is really a way of looking at packaging synergistically and holistically.  So for cube, it’s about reducing the size of packaging for our notebooks and desktops by about 10%. 

It’s about increasing the amount of recycled content for packaging components by 40%.  And importantly for customers, to make it easier to dispose and recycle the packaging, we want our packaging to have 75% of its components to be curbside recyclable.  This really creates a holistic view of packaging and it’s one that we challenge the rest of the industry to join us in, in making it easier for customers and also better for our communities and for our environment.

We think, by this approach, over the next four years, by 2012, we’ll reduce by over 20 million pounds of packaging material and save eight million dollars.  To us, that’s turning green into gold.  What I have here with me today is an example of our studio hybrid packaging.  The outer shipping box, made from 25% recycled material.  And as I open it up and we look inside, we have on the left the system with its cushions in black and accessory box. 

So let me walk you through what we’ve done here.  So as we look at the system and our cushions-- and this is what protects the product when it’s dropped-- these cushions are made from 100% recycled material.  They’re made from high-density polyethylene and these are made from recycled milk jugs and detergent bottles, everyday materials.  For the first year of this product, we’ll use approximately two million milk jugs that’ll go into the use of these cushions.  That’s two million milk jugs that are kept out of landfills across the country.  As I said, they’re curbside recyclable.  Look over here to the accessory box.  Tried to make this as small as possible. 

As we look at our documentation, this has been reduced by over 50% in size.  Then we have our layout for our accessories, for cables, stands, power adapter, and various clips, plus a spot here for CDs.  Then as we look in the bottom of the box, here’s an area for the keyboard and mouse.  The overall size of this box has been reduced by about 45% from its predecessor. 

So that’s part of how we’re working to reduce the volume of our boxes, increase the amount of recycled content, and make it easier for our customers to recycle in a responsible way by using curbside recyclable materials.  This is really just a first step for us at Dell, but we think it’s an important first step and we encourage the rest of the industry to join us in these actions. 

Thank you very much and have a great day.  We’ll see you later.  Bye bye.

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