HP Doubles Recycling Efforts

Dec. 21, 2004

To further encourage the recycling of unwanted computers and printers, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett Packard Development Co. LP during April of this year doubled the value of its return and recycling e-coupon for U.S. consumers. People with used or outdated PCs, laptops and monitors got up to $100 toward the purchase of a new HP product when they signed up for HP's recycling service online. Depending upon the type of product involved, recycling cost consumers between $17 and $46, with HP arranging for pickup from their homes. The e-coupon recycling program is actually a year-round incentive, but this year and last HP doubled the value of its e-coupons during April as a way of celebrating Earth Day. Roseville, Calif.-based Chris Altobell, HP's marketing manager for product recycling, says the company doesn't disclose the numbers of people taking advantage of the double e-coupon offer, but he does say that this April and last there were three times as many people registering for the e-coupon recycling program as during a regular month. HP touts its e-coupon and double e-coupon programs as a "simple and easy" way for consumers to get rid of old computer hardware and replace it with new. "By tying the consumer directly to the recycling program, the e-coupon programs promote customer loyalty and repeat business," says HP. HP has been recycling computers at its own facilities since the late-1980s and began consumer hardware recycling in 1997. Each month, says the company, it recycles more than 6 million pounds of computer equipment globally, including products from other manufacturers. The products HP collects are evaluated for reuse, donation or recycling. The company has two U.S. recycling facilities, one in Roseville, Calif., northeast of Sacramento, and the other at LaVergne, Tenn., southeast of Nashville.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.

      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).

      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.

      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”

      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.