In an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review, John Pflueger, principal environmental strategist for Dell, discusses Dell’s innovations in packaging, and why reporting into marketing works for his sustainability team. Pflueger spoke recently with Nina Kruschwitz, editor of the sustainability content initiative at MIT SMR. Here’s an edited excerpt from that interview:
Nina Kruschwitz: So let’s talk about packaging. Dell has been an innovator there.
John Pflueger: Yeah, we’ve got a great subject-matter expert who runs our packaging group and he’s very interested in sustainability-related topics, very personally motivated. So he started looking for different alternatives for packaging, and he found a company in China that was interested in seeing if you could use bamboo fibers in the same way you use paper fibers today for cardboard packaging. Bamboo is native to China and it’s one of the fastest growing plants in the world. It’s a very renewable resource.
They experimented with the material, and they actually found a way to use bamboo as a raw material for manufacturing packaging. Now, I don’t think we use it on any of our big systems, but right now, 70 percent of notebooks ship in bamboo. Its structural strength makes it great for shipping our high-tech products.
You might think that packaging seems like this mundane, boring topic, but it really addresses a recurring pain point with a lot of our customers. So Oliver Campbell, our subject matter expert, continues to say, “Well, what’s the next thing I can do?’
Kruschwitz: That’s really interesting. What other kinds of packaging ideas is he coming up with?
Pflueger: One of the things he’s been experimenting with is this notion of finding a material that’s local to where the factories are, that’s renewable, or would otherwise be considered waste in and of itself, and something that’s compostable. So now, they’re looking at something called “mushroom packaging.” They take agricultural waste, in this case cotton hull, and they put the cotton hull into a form shaped like the packaging they want with mushroom spores, and then the mushroom spores feed on the hull and grow into the form. When they reach the proper size and have filled up the form, they kill off the mushroom spores and you’re left with a piece of compostable packaging material.
It’s absolutely amazing. The fungal mycelium, which are essentially mushroom roots, act like a glue and we don’t let them grow long enough to produce mushrooms. So, we don’t have to worry about having them trigger mushroom-based allergies. Rumor has it that Oliver actually ripped off a tiny piece of these things and chewed it. Just to make sure. It apparently could use some soy sauce.
Kruschwitz: That’s amazing. Who does your team report up to?
Pflueger: Ultimately, we report into the global marketing organization, which may sound a little weird to some, but I actually think it’s a fantastic place for a sustainability organization to sit.
Kruschwitz: How so?
Pflueger: Because it gives us the ability to get a lot of insight into issues of materiality, or relevance. Investigations of materiality have long been common in the accounting world, but that’s relatively new in the sustainability domain.
… as businesses learn more about sustainability, some of the questions that are being asked are: What are the impacts of the business from a positive point of view? What are the costs associated with these? So, the relevance or the materiality of working on sustainability issues has become very important.
Companies want to link between what they do within a sustainability initiative and the results, the benefits that accrue back to the business as a result of working on the initiative. In what way is the initiative material to the growth or success of the business?
Kruschwitz: And reporting to the chief marketing officer gives you special insight into the answers to these kinds of questions?
Pflueger: There are two main characteristics that make our placement under the CMO valuable. One is that the CMO heads up a global organization. So, the chief marketing officer has responsibilities across the entire globe, which give us reach geographically.
And second, since it is a marketing organization, it has a lot of functions that are valuable that we can leverage, and it’s broad in reach from a functional point of view in terms of ease of access or our ease of working with different stakeholders within the broader industry.
We can develop a better understanding of the connection between sustainability-related issues and initiatives and brand value and brand equity. In addition, we have access to better tools and more access to information that helps us understand what we can do that our customers need, as well as connections into the analyst and stakeholder community.
In my experience, shepherding sustainability efforts is harder if you are part of a diversity organization or if you are part of a compliance organization or if you are part of a legal organization.
Adapted from “How Dell Turned Bamboo and Mushrooms Into Environmental-Friendly Packaging” by Nina Kruschwitz, which was published by MIT Sloan Management Review in July 2012. This interview is part ofMIT SMR’s research and content theme, Sustainability & Innovation. The complete interview is available athttp://mitsmr.com/O9f61X.
Source / Fuente: GreenBiz.com
Author / Autor: Nina Kruschwitz
Date / Fecha: 29/07/12
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