Accelerating Circular Economy with Dell Technologies

The goods of today are the resources of tomorrow at yesterday’s resource prices.

Walter R. Stahel

As global challenges like climate change, pollution, and waste loom large, the shift to a circular economy presents a viable and efficient way to resolve these issues. It is an approach that offers an opportunity to rethink, redesign, and reconceptualize economies to better address human needs and make more efficient use of natural resources. It enables unlocking value from regeneration and restoration, rather than extraction and consumption.

Organizations today are moving towards circular business models so they can step forward and leverage their scale to drive circularity into the mainstream. Manufacturers can hike up their profitability through greater reusability, durability, and energy and water efficiency, which provides them the incentive to use sustainably-designed products. Similarly, industries across the board can be instrumental in transitioning to a more agile, sustainability-focused circular economy as well. This shift is already reflected in the form of mounting environmentally- and socially- responsible initiatives, new environmental rules, and regulations, and increasing expectations around sound environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles in the face of the climate crisis.

Progress Made Real: Advancing sustainability at every step

At Dell Technologies, we’re committed to driving human progress through the power of innovation. We believe in creating a positive and lasting social impact on humankind and the planet, using our reach, people, and technology. Our annual, Progress Made Real report, reveals how we’re taking actions today to build a brighter tomorrow, with accelerating the circular economy being one of our core initiatives.

We’re accelerating the adoption of the circular economy by eliminating waste and rethinking, redesigning, reusing, and recycling our way to a better future. In this light, we’re making strides to take back as much as we produce and design products and materials that last as long as possible.

Our Moonshot Goal states that by 2030, for every product a customer buys, an equivalent product will be reused or recycled. And, more than half of the product content and 100% of our product packaging will be derived from recycled or renewable material.

Towards this end, we’ve already developed more than 125 products using closed-loop plastics and deriving 21% of our laptop lids from bioplastics. We’re also managing e-waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the world, with our global takeback and recycling efforts.

Driving change while embracing circular innovation

Circular design

Sustainability lies at the heart of everything we do. It is the central tenet of our product lifecycle – from the initial concept, its usage, to the eventual recycling. We strive to achieve zero waste by increasingly adopting recycled-content and renewable materials for our products and packaging and maximizing energy efficiency.

This approach is focused on our design for the environment, global regulations and standards, voluntary social and environmental initiatives, and various eco-label programs. We’re also following corporate environmental policy, and the ISO 14001 standard for managing environmental programs throughout the lifecycle.

We’re proud that more than 90% of a typical Dell laptop today is recyclable. At a corporate level, we purchase renewable electricity and avoid waste at every stage to drive operational efficiency and conservation. Along with this, we work closely with our suppliers to encourage the adoption of these approaches into their operations.

Our global takeback options make recycling seamless for our customers when products reach the end of life. Some materials go back to the start of our production process while others are sold to different organizations for use in their products.

Similarly, we drive reuse by selling refurbished and returned products through our Global Dell Outlet and check products from being recycled before the end of their useful lives.

Material use

Our environmental responsibility extends beyond creating eco-friendly products or initiatives. We reuse, remanufactured, and recycle products and materials at the end of their lifecycle. This includes recycling the plastic in old electronics for new computers, pioneering bio-based technologies to package our products, returning materials to our production cycles or back to the market, to recycling and repurposing scrap materials innovatively.

Our vision for the future

Our recent, Concept Luna, reveals our future vision of circular design with components that are instantly accessible, replaceable, and reusable. It is our endeavour to push the limits of sustainable PC design to accelerate the reuse of products and materials and cut back on waste and emissions for the future.

However, doing it all alone is not feasible. So, we are committed to continuing working both within and across industries to deliver meaningful change. We’re taking big steps towards shrinking waste, resource use, and greenhouse gas emissions and keeping resources circulating within the economy through constant innovation and collaboration in the pursuit of a net-zero future.