HP Leads Industry Consortium to Create the Definitive Environmental Declaration for Printing Supplies

HP today announced the definitive environmental self declaration for printing supplies, called the ‘IT Eco Declaration for Print Supplies’, which will enable purchasers of printing supplies to make informed, environmentally-aware choices – regardless of which company’s supplies they purchase.

The declaration is voluntary, controlled by a third partyand brings together criteria from several other eco labels such as German Blue Angel and Nordic Swan, as well as eco labels in Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

It answers the questions asked most frequently by customers and forms a comprehensive source of standardised, comparable product environmental information.

Examples of the more than 30 self-declared environmental characteristics include the weight of the cartridge, whether the printing supply contains hazardous substances, the availability of a Material Safety Data Sheet and whether the manufacturer offers a recycling programme for the product.

To satisfy the declaration, member companies must sign a contract with Swedish IT-Företagen, verify compliance statements on request, immediately correct any discovered errors, and pay a small annual fee. Non-compliance can and does result in exclusion from the system.

“Everyone wins with the IT Eco Declaration. The right information is available for customers to make the choices they feel are right for them.” said Vincent Vanderpoel, vice president and general manager, IPG Supplies, HP EMEA.

“The IT Eco Declaration for Print Supplies sits alongside the Planet Partners recycling initiative and the Design for Environment programme as testimony to HP’s hard work in this area,” he added.

HP’s Hans Wendschlag, Nordic environmental programme manager, chaired the working group of major companies including Canon, Sharp and Ricoh, to produce the declaration which provides environmental details on aspects such as regulatory compliance, manufacturing practices, material selection and recycling programmes.

“The IT Eco Declaration for Print Supplies is an industry-led initiative with teeth, as non-compliance can lead to exclusion from the system,” commented Wendschlag. “We have 10 years’ experience with the IT Eco Declaration for IT hardware products, where more than 80 percent of all IT companies on the Nordic market have already signed on, meeting customer demand for objective, comparable information.”

“The Eco Declaration is a product of real industry cooperation and a shared desire to keep customers properly informed. All companies involved in the printing supplies industry will want to embrace the chance to display their environmental credentials in a meaningful way, the better to serve the customer” said Ylva Hambraeus Björling, at the Swedish IT-Företagen, the IT & Telecom Association that has witnessed the declaration from conception through to publishing.

The IT Eco Declaration for IT hardware products has its origins in the early 1990s, when customers, largely from the Swedish public sector, began to request information about the environmental properties of the IT equipment they purchased.

As demand for this information grew so did the number of competing environmental eco labels. This made compliance slow and very expensive and confused customers rather than inform them, as there were multiple eco labels with different standards.

To address this issue the Swedish IT & Telecom Association established an industry forum in 1996. The IT Eco Declaration for Print Supplies is the product of one of the forum’s working groups.

The declaration has since been taken up by the IT industry in Denmark, Norway, and Finland. In 2004 the US Environmental Protection Agency incorporated much of it into its system for helping environmentally-minded purchasers select IT equipment, known as the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool or EPEAT. In 2005, ECMA International set up a project group to harmonise its TR/70 standard with the Eco Declaration, which in June 2006 became the international standard ECMA-370.

HP focuses on simplifying technology experiences for all of its customers – from individual consumers to the largest businesses. With a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP is among the world’s largest IT companies, with revenue totaling $94.1 billion for the four fiscal quarters ended Jan. 31, 2007. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com.