Tech companies need to collaborate more on sustainability: Lenovo’s Quatela

For us, it's first a corporate responsibility to honour the challenge that we're all facing, and future generations are facing, Lenovo's Quatela said

Lenovo is one of the technology companies in the world to have committed to “net zero” targets. Laura Quatela, its senior vice-president and chief legal officer, sat down with DH’s Lavpreet Kaur to shed light on its sustainability goals and practices, and its vision to mitigate climate change. Edited excerpts.

Tell us about your most important sustainability goal.

So you know, how much stuff we put out in the world. And when we talk about the different philosophies Eastern to Western. Western, I'm afraid we're very much about disposal. There's really a tradition in the East of recycling and reusing and finding new uses for old materials, right? And that's where we're gravitating. For us, it's really about designing your product or your service, putting it out for use, and then returning those materials to a different use. So it's the circular economy that we, and I think, other tech companies are really obligated to serve and to help that philosophy migrate from East to West.

Could you shed light on something you did recently to better manage e-waste?

During COVID, we found that there was such a need for laptops among students. So we began to have an asset recovery service. It's a long-standing service that was provided to customers, but rather than gathering those used PCs and then finding a way to responsibly dispose off the plastics and materials, we actually refurbished those laptops and through the government, we were able to distribute them to kids who couldn't afford to buy a laptop in the first place.

Tell us about your partnerships in India to meet your green goals.

Every tech company has its plan. Some of those are science-based and others are “let's make the promise and figure out how to get there”. There's not a huge amount of collaboration among tech companies on the shared plans for achieving the goals, but there should be and I think that that will come right now. What there is, is a big push by the United Nations to get us to work together. So we are involved in a very important project on climate change that I can't talk about yet, but it is a consortium of companies that is working in a shared way towards helping the world achieve climate change.

They say sustainability comes with a price.

I'm trying not to think about this in terms of profit opportunity. For us, it's first a corporate responsibility and a community commitment to honour the challenge that we're all facing, and future generations are facing. And it's just like being a successful tech company, we feel that we have an obligation to make sure that we contribute to solving some of these problems. There is a profit side of it, however, because our customers are pulling from us, seeing us setting some leadership targets and achieving them, coming to us and saying what helps us with our journey. So there's definitely a commercial business aspect to sustainability. It's definitely one hand feeding the other.

How is Lenovo planning to work with its suppliers in India for more sustainable products?

We have a vast network of suppliers from India that we work with, who meet the technical skills and exercise sustainable methods. We are already enhancing our supply chain from a sustainability and security perspective and will continue to do so. We are expanding our supply chain in India through our Make in India initiatives.

Take us through some of your efforts to score higher on the sustainability front.

I've seen this tremendous groundswell of employee interest in sustainability and wanting to find ways that they can contribute. From a sustainability standpoint, our packaging, we've recently shifted from this typical plastic and cardboard kind of stuff to bamboo packaging that's entirely compostable. That was an employee idea. And the project was launched by a cross-functional group.

Was the switch to sustainability more challenging during the pandemic?

I think our big differentiator as a company is that we're vertically integrated for manufacturers. We control our own manufacturing. We are not heavily reliant on third-party suppliers as our competitors. So, we were able to, in a very responsible way, stay true to our sustainability objectives, while also using our broad manufacturing footprint to move things around as needed in response to supply chain disruptions. Leveraging that global manufacturing footprint gave us the flexibility to not have to shut off the sustainability efforts, but rather to continue them and learn new ways of achieving them during the pandemic.

Tell us about your Environmental, Social, and Governance achievements in India.

During the pandemic, we contributed $15 million to various communities in various ways. In India, we've impacted the lives of 3 million people through our foundation. So, we feel like we have a good reach and a good focus in our philanthropic efforts, and we take it very seriously as part of our ESG commitment.