As Dell’s head of Dell Sustainability, I’m focused on ways you can integrate environmental responsibility into the way you buy, use and dispose of your computer equipment. We offer customers two broad options:
Donate it. When you are finished using your computer consider donating it to a non-profit organization. While you may have outgrown its features, an organization that cannot afford technology may be able to use it for years to come.
Dell connects customers to donation opportunities through the National Cristina Foundation, which will make arrangements to pick up the equipment and put it to good use. Additionally, Dell and Goodwill have joined in support of putting people to work through the donation of computer equipment under the Reconnect Partnership currently available in some markets in the U.S. Reconnect takes advantage of the existing donation and retail infrastructure of Goodwill and the recycling experience and resources of Dell to offer a proactive, community-based solution to environmentally responsible electronic disposal.
Recycle it. As many of you know there are better options than throwing an old computer out in the trash, especially because many computers contain some environmentally-sensitive materials. Moreover, materials in a computer can be recycled and reused.
Dell is committed to making it easy, convenient and affordable to dispose of end-of-life computers. We recognize our responsibility to recycle the products we make and sell. And our recycling partners are managed to high safety and environmental standards, which we enforce through regular audits. Importantly, we prohibit the landfill or export to developing nations of environmentally-sensitive materials.
Here is a vlog from Kate Krebs, Executive Director of the National Recycling Coalition, who shares her views on Dell’s recycling initiatives.
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For consumers, we are excited to soon provide you free recycling of any Dell-branded product, whether or not you are purchasing a replacement product. Dell is the first in our industry to offer consumers this free recycling option. See this PDF for more details. You can also listen to this webcast from Michael Dell. We will also continue to offer consumers free recycling of any brand of used computer or printer with the purchase of a new Dell computer or printer. And for our business, government and education customers, we offer Asset Recovery Services, providing logistics and disposal capabilities to responsibly recover owned and/or leased computer equipment.
Due in part to our list of recycling options we provide our customers, we shared the top spot with Nokia in Greenpeace’s recent guide to green electronics. In their PDF report on Dell, Greenpeace lowered our overall score because we don’t currently offer PC models that are free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or brominated flame retardants (BFRs). We have established timelines to limit the use of both—more on that in a future post.