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An important breakthrough was Dell's willingness to develop its take back operations as an integral part of its business by viewing it as a potential profit center. This is enormously important as we often struggle in dialogue with companies who insist on viewing environmental costs as a drag on earnings and externalities for which someone else should be responsible.
| The company's consumer program returns are still a trickle and reflect a cost. However, this cost is offset by an aggressive effort to capture the take back business of large business and institutional customers. Its large customers pay Dell to take old computers off their hands, destroy information on hard drives, and provide recycling. This large volume equipment returns program subsidizes the lagging consumer program.
Dell is also sending a strong message about the business potential of recycling by providing its sales staff with incentives for winning contracts to take back large volumes of old computers from businesses and institutions.
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"Engagement with expert stakeholder organizations like As You Sow is critical in helping Dell meet our goals to be a responsible market leader. This engagement has helped us better understand emerging corporate responsibility issues, external perceptions of our performance, and helped us develop more responsive corporate policies to address those issues."
- Tod Arbogast, Sustainable Business Director, Dell Inc.
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The company's approach nudges it closer to placing take back on a par with product sales for employees and helps establish recycling as a permanent, credible part of its business. By providing incentives and measurements of recycling operations, Dell is accepting responsibility for the "externality" of product disposal that was previously placed on government and other entities. It provides a model to challenge Apple, HP and IBM to emulate.
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