Hewlett Packards state of the art Technology Renewal Centre in Erskine, Renfrewshire was, until 2010, the companys main manufacturing hub in the UK. When the production line shifted to the Czech Republic, fears that jobs would be shed were dispelled when the company announced that it would switch the sites emphasis from production to reuse.
The 8,400 square metre site, which is owned and operated by HPs Financial Services subsidiary, opened in early 2012. The plant is now geared to reconditioning IT equipment returned by the companys commercial clients in Europe, Africa and the Middle East who are looking to replace their existing hardware with newer models.
In order to prevent this equipment gathering dust in a warehouse or being dumped on a scraphead, HP has committed to processing all of the old kit returned by clients, and where possible, returning it to the market.
Items such as PCs, laptops and data servers undergo a thorough testing and auditing process at the site with working equipment returned to its original factory specifications. Functional items are then sold back to both public and private sector organisations, while equipment that is no longer working is dismantled and recycled off site.
Jim OGrady, director of global asset management for HP Financial Services, said: HP Financial Services manages and remarkets more than 2.3 million legacy IT assets each year. Equipped to handle the strategic requirements of enterprises large and small, the Erskine facility will enable HP Financial Services to significantly expand the global capabilities, asset management and recycling services we provide our customers.
The Erskine plant is modelled on HPs existing technology renewal centre in Andover, USA, which according to the company, refurbished a total of 30,000 tonnes of IT equipment in 2010. Although the Erskine plant is on a smaller scale than the US site, the company predicts that it will process around 60,000 PCs and 100,000 Enterprise products per month.
Reuse
With its history in manufacturing HP products, many of the staff at the Erskine facility will have the unusual task of taking apart equipment are able to use their knowledge of the production process to good effect, refurbishing equipment they would have been responsible for building when they first came onto the market.
Mr OGrady explains: Each piece of equipment has a unique reference number to indicate the engineer who put it together. Some of these employees will be able to take apart a piece of equipment and see that it was something that they had built years ago.
The Erskine Technology Renewal Centre forms only part of HPs environmental policy. Another area where the company is looking to improve its environmental performance is eco design, and manufacturing products with recycling in mind.
Bruno Zago, HPs environmental manager for the UK and Ireland, explains: That approach is much better going forward. We want to make products as recyclable as possible. HP has just launched the Z series, which is a new work station that has been designed to be modular so that the owner of the product can take out all the pieces and replace them very easily.
Responsibility
As such, the company strongly advocates an individual producer responsibility scheme that would see manufacturers of electrical equipment responsible for recycling their own products at the end of their working life.
I wouldnt necessarily say there is a disincentive, but I would say that some manufacturers are taking recycling more seriously when designing new products. And, this is where individual producer responsibility comes in. If it takes two minutes to take apart an HP notebook but eight minutes to take apart a competitors product, we wont see that benefit if everything is collected together.
We are not seeing the benefits of the work that we have done, but for us it is just as important to show leadership and to show the industry how things can be done.
With more than 120 million PCs expected to be refurbished, remarketed and reused over the next five years in the global reuse market, HP is hoping that facilities like the Erskine Technology Renewal Centre will push it ahead of the pack in IT sustainability.
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