Sustainability in Action: Lenovo’s Innovations in Product Design, Circular Economy, and Customer Empowerment
Originally published in Lenovo's 2023/24 ESG Report
Innovating for manufacturing sustainability
In FY 2023/24, Lenovo finalized and put into use an ESG management system called Lenovo ESG Navigator that helps monitor key ESG metrics in manufacturing. The innovative system offers near real-time insights on greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, replacing traditional manual management of ESG metrics with a flexible, transparent, and highly automated approach that captures data across the value chain from a single point of control, enabling more data-informed decisions in areas impacting sustainability performance.
Innovating to help customers meet sustainability goals
Lenovo is focused on providing products and services that help contribute to customers’ sustainability goals and a smarter future for all. Through focused initiatives at the product, packaging, and service level, Lenovo is innovating to improve the sustainability features of products and empower customers with options to consider sustainability through services.
Product and packaging innovations that focus on carbon impact
The latest generation of Lenovo Neptune™ liquid cooling technology is delivered in a broader range of ThinkSystem servers than prior generations, making its sustainability benefits available to more of Lenovo’s customers. Lenovo Neptune™ liquid cooling technology helps to optimize product performance by capturing up to 98 percent of the system heat and reducing power consumption by up to 40 percent.
In addition to product innovations in its servers, Lenovo takes a holistic look at customer experience and sustainability goals by improving packaging design across product offerings. The Infrastructure Solutions Group uses a rack integration method of shipping servers with pre-installed in racks, saving 105 pounds of cardboard per rack. Lenovo designs select PC packaging for it to be made from more sustainable materials like bamboo and sugar cane.
Empowering customers with more sustainable choices
Lenovo provides IT life cycle solutions such as Asset Recovery Services, CO2 offsetting capabilities, Reduced Carbon Transport options, and certified refurbished equipment. All of Lenovo’s products are offered as-a-service, a delivery model which can help optimize IT asset sustainability.
- TruScale Everything-as-a-Service: Circular Economy is all about designing out waste from the value chain. TruScale ‘as a Service’ offerings optimize the process by leaving each stage of a product’s cycle in the hands of qualified professionals so a customer can focus on their productivity priorities. TruScale inserts predictability into lifecycle management, enabling companies to plan and help maximize the reuse or recovery of their technology.
- Asset Recovery Service: This service helps mitigate the environmental and data security risks associated with end-of-life asset disposal while aiming to maximize the value potential of those assets, with the main goal to reutilize, recover, and in the end, recycle resources.
- Reduced Carbon Transport: This new solution empowers Lenovo’s customers with transportation alternatives for IT purchases that generate lower carbon emissions, such as those that allow the purchase of Sustainable Aviation Fuel credits.
Innovative solutions for a circular economy
Lenovo’s vision to deliver Smarter Technology for All extends to its practices that include Smarter Circular Design, Smarter Circular Use, and Smarter Circular Return activities. In a circular economy, products are made, used, then returned, instead of being discarded and consigned to waste. In this model, value is extracted from a resource while in use. Then, at the end of its service life, the resource is recovered, refurbished, and redeployed. This drives greater resource productivity, aims to make businesses more competitive, and helps create new opportunities for growth. The demand for a more circular economy has given rise to the ‘as a service’ or usage models seen across many industries in which the users pay for only what they need when they need it, and return the assets or resources when they are finished.
Lenovo provides innovative solutions for its customers’ business needs that help reduce the volume of end-of-life electronic products that may otherwise, be discarded or consigned to waste. These solutions include:
- Services that help keep products operating longer;
- Services that help make infrastructure management easier;
- Solutions to manage its customers’ products at the end of life to help maximize value and reuse opportunities.
Lenovo’s introduction of TruScale Device as a Service (TruScale DaaS) to the PC industry has helped enable organizations to maximize value throughout a product’s lifecycle and minimize raw material use and waste generation. TruScale DaaS is a usage model in which the consumer pays to use the device of their choice as they need it and has the option of pausing or returning the device when it is not in use. Along with the device, Lenovo offers a variety of services that aim to protect and support the asset during its lifecycle. When the device reaches the end of its service life, Lenovo will collect the device, wipe it clean of the customer’s data, and strive to recycle and re-purpose the device. This means the device can either be refurbished and reintroduced into a new working environment, or the device’s parts can be used to repair other devices under warranty.
Customers only pay for what they use, avoiding the heavy capital outlays of the ownership model, as well as escaping the burden and cost of disposal. These services are addressing the industry’s transformation to as-a-service and providing lifecycle value to Lenovo’s customers.
To help scale circular economy solutions in the IT industry, Lenovo has established a target to enable the recycling and reuse of 800 million pounds of end-of-life products by FY 2025/263. For more information see Section 9.0.
3 Cumulative total since 2005.
