Supply Chain Management Review

Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (1)

HP: The new "Big Box" Retailer?
July 21, 2008

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year, you know that "green" is in, and if you haven't at least explored some changes in your supply chain to get yourself on the bandwagon, you're about to be left behind.

Lots of "reduce, reuse, recycle" ideas have been bouncing around. Chief among them is the idea of reducing packaging size. Jack T. Ampuja, a professor at Niagara University, gave an interesting presentation at a recent SCOPE event in Philadelphia talking about the importance of reducing packaging size to conserve materials. (Full disclosure: Ampuja is also on Supply Chain Management Review's editorial advisory board.)

The tech industry has changed to accommodate, and until now I'd have thought they were leading the charge on slimmer packaging. Long before "An Inconvenient Truth" scared the daylights out of the world, software companies in particular eschewed the "bigger = better" idea that was popular in the 90s, in exchange for smaller boxes roughly the size of a really thick edition of Reader's Digest. Other computer software and hardware manufacturers have followed suit.

And then there's HP, which, according to this article I found at theregister, a UK-based online tech journal, clearly hasn't gotten the memo. Now, in all fairness, I'm willing to bet that this is not the norm for the computer giant, but the fact that this happened at all shows how much work needs to be done, at least as far as the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" goes.

Equally amusing would be the comments I found on slashdot on this issue. Commented one person: "Looks like HP should invent itself some envelopes."

Posted by Sean Murphy on July 21, 2008 | Comments (1)