Cisco: Publicly Available Life Cycle Assessments Document Our Products’ Environmental Impact
By Michael King, Andrea Rota
We are excited to announce that Cisco is now publishing life cycle assessments (LCAs) for some of our hardware products.
LCAs estimate a product’s environmental impact associated with its production, transport, use, and end-of-life. An LCA takes multiple environmental impact categories into account, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water consumption, resource depletion and others, and evaluates all stages of a product’s life cycle using an inventory of relevant environmental inputs.
The LCA reports are publicly available on cisco.com to provide transparent environmental impact information about Cisco products to our customers, partners, and other stakeholders.
For products we assess, we publish a detailed report and a two-page summary outlining high-level results of the product’s GHG emissions.
Product LCA reports provide many benefits, including:
- Giving customers visibility into the environmental impact of the products they purchase from Cisco
- Supporting customers in calculating the overall environmental impact and GHG emissions of their IT infrastructure
- Informing Cisco product design decisions by identifying opportunities to reduce energy consumption, optimize resource use and reduce waste
- Enabling Cisco to identify component-level hotspots and help prioritize how to address those high impact areas
- Addressing product ecolabel requirements
- Using the findings to implement best practices in Cisco’s Circular Design Principles.
Our team in the Cisco Chief Sustainability Office is partnering with colleagues in Cisco’s Supply Chain organization and product business units to produce these reports. We plan to continue to publish the reports on cisco.com as they become available.
Our hope is that the LCAs illustrate a product’s impact on the environment, providing valuable insights to help Cisco teams design products with sustainability in mind and increase visibility on product environmental impacts for Cisco and our customers.
While many technology companies publish LCAs, Cisco is one of the first to produce them for networking equipment, such as Catalyst switches.
You can find information about our LCA methodology in our published reports. We intend to continue refining our methodology, assess our products, and publish the results to facilitate continued transparency. We also plan to leverage the LCAs as we track our progress toward our goal to reach net zero GHG emissions by 2040.
The LCA reports are publicly available on cisco.com to provide transparent environmental impact information about Cisco products to our customers, partners, and other stakeholders.
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