Green Options

Actor William Shatner, known by us all as Captain Kirk in the original series of Star Trek, has launched a stinging attack on the green credentials of Hewlett-Packard, after leaving a company-wide voicemail message for staff at the firm’s HQ.

“This is William Shatner. You, HP, promised me a toxic free computer by 2009. Now my friends at Greenpeace tell me I will have to wait until 2011. What’s up with that?” he said.

We saw Wal-Mart, a company with worldwide-wide revenues only second to Exxon-Mobile, signal last week in Beijing that it is moving away from “intermittent transactions with many suppliers toward longer-term arrangements with a smaller group of manufacturers“. Then, this week in the news, IBM starts on a roll to eliminate the ‘burden’ of paper — including paper costs, compliance risks and environmental challenges — from their customers’ supply chains with a handful of recently launched software and services.

What is going on here? Both companies are adopting tactics used by sustainability minded entrepreneurs as part of the time tested sustainability supply chain model: measure, purchase local where possible, maintain long-term relationships and integrate accountability at all ‘nodes’ of the chain.