The Circular Economy - the Key to a Sustainable Future
Procurement is a major part in this transition towards the circular economy. For instance, the simple act of transitioning from buying a good to buying a service, such as managed print services, brings a host of sustainability benefits. Whether that’s eliminating the need to extract ever-increasing amounts of natural resources or preventing resources going back into landfill.
“It also helps our customers moving from capital expenditure to operating expenditure: if you move to a service model, it does not effect the balance sheets and has a huge impact on the finances of our customers - in a good way,” said HP’s Mesmain.
For years IT leaders have worked to a consumption-based approach: purchasing laptops, printers or ink cartridges and replace them regularly. But the circular economy is ushering in a different model that replaces these unsustainable one-time transactions with ongoing, contractual, subscription-based customer service relationships.
By simply shifting to manage print services (MPS), you can outsource responsibility for managing your printer fleet to an outside expert, which not only frees up time to focus on more important tasks but also vastly improves the green credentials of your organisation.
By partnering with HP Managed Print Services, for example, you will benefit from printer consolidation or replacing older machines with newer, more energy-efficient ones. HP will also ensure you have the right amount of ink and toner on hand at any given time and programme machines in the fleet to print more efficiently by, for instance, defaulting to printing on both sides of a sheet of paper. In total, MPS can help reduce printing costs by 10% to 30%, paper waste by 25% and energy use by 20% to 40%1.
HP DaaS will also propel your organisation towards hitting its sustainability goals by ensuring you have access to a full portfolio of modern personal systems and products, as well as IT and life cycle management services. HP will equip employees with devices suited to their needs, no matter your organisation’s budget, as well as identify and prevent issues with actionable analytics and keep devices up and running with world-class repair services.
This means that if something goes wrong, there’s no long wait for an IT ticket to be logged - HP can ensure devices are up and running and that your business’s operations are not compromised.
When your organisation is finished with the products, or a device reaches end of life, HP manages all hardware and software migration and decommissioning, which includes refurbishing or responsibly disposing of old products. Historically, approximately 90% of returned products have retained value and are reused.
While different types of industries face different types of challenges when it comes to becoming more sustainable, all organisations are under pressure to do more. Customers and employees want it, and stakeholders and investors alike are making ESG credentials a number one priority.
While it can be difficult for CIOs to know where to begin, it’s clear that there’s a solution out there for every business.
1 https://www.hp.com/gb-en/shop/tech-takes/pathways-to-sustainable-culture
