Xerox's Slash-and-Save Climate Approach

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Through innovation and operational changes, Xerox reduced its greenhouse gas emissions 18 percent below 2002 levels. The move saved the company $18 million dollars and spurred a new, more stringent goal of driving down emissions 25 percent below that 2002 baseline.

So how did the company do it? Patricia Calkins of Xerox is joining us today to tell us how.

Tilde Herrera: Welcome to the program today. Would you start by introducing yourself, and describing your job and what you do for Xerox?

Patricia Calkins: Yes. My title is vice president of environment, health, and safety for Xerox Corporation, and the role is global in nature, so across the corporation as well as across the world.

(I'm) responsible for making sure that our employees are safe, our customers are safe, and that our environmental performance is safe for our employees, communities, customers, etcetera.

TH: In 2003, the company joined the EPA's Climate Leaders Program, and it set a goal of reducing its emissions 10 percent below 2002 levels by 2012. Can you talk a little bit about how the company chose this goal?

PC: The way that we established the goal is we first put together a very small team because we recognized that we wanted to establish a goal to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions because we were concerned about the implications on climate change.

Internally, we looked at some of the things that we could do, and what we thought we might achieve from those actions. We looked at what other companies were doing, and then we put together a proposal.

We felt that 10 percent would be a very challenging target for us. We didn't want to establish something that would be very easy to achieve. We wanted to set a stretch goal.

And then we briefed our CEO, Anne Mulcahy, who approved it and was very, very supportive. Then we submitted it to the United States EPA Climate Leaders program. They reviewed it, agreed that it was a challenging goal and we launched it from there.

TH: And how did the company go about attacking this goal?

PC: Well, following establishing the goal, we then put together a steering committee and several teams that consisted of employees in Xerox that were in the organizations who were contributing to our emissions most significantly; and they put together plans to reduce, and some of the ways that we got those reductions were through several different areas.

One is just basically reducing our energy consumption in our facilities by doing things like, you know, putting in more efficient lighting; making sure that our buildings were at the temperatures that were optimal, so not too cool in the summer, not too warm in the winter; through project investments like direct digital controls; upgrading equipment like boilers and motors and compressors.

Then we also did technology improvements where, in our manufacturing processes, how we manufacture toner. We made that 22 percent more energy efficient. We designed new toner that is 25 to 30 percent more energy efficient than our current toner manufacturing.

And then we also reduced the miles traveled for our field service technicians who go out and service our products by designing our products to be more reliable, and also by making sure that we schedule the calls for them to travel from customer site to customer site in a more efficient way; and we also have what we call remote diagnostics and sensing for our products to actually reduce or eliminate the need to actually go to a customer site to service the equipment.

So those are some examples of some of the things that we actually implemented to achieve our target.

TH: I think that the toner is a really great example of how a company uses innovation to reduce its environmental footprint.

Can you talk a little bit more about how the company invented this toner? I know that you just opened a new facility. Can you talk a little bit about the facility, and how that facility differs from other Xerox facilities?

PC: Sure. So there were two aspects of the toner. I think I mentioned briefly that our current toner, which requires a lot of grinding to make the toner -- which is very energy intensive -- our technologists innovated a material called embrittling agent which, when added, it reduces the amount of energy needed to produce our conventional toner by 22percent.

But then the new toner, which we call emulsion aggregation toner, doesn't need any grinding whatsoever. In fact, the toner is grown to the size that we need it to be, so they're very uniform in size and in shape.

And we then opened a facility in the Rochester, N.Y. area that we've designed as a intelligent building As a part of that, we installed over 4,000 sensors in the building so that only the portions of the manufacturing process needed at the time to do that portion of manufacturing would be energized, and the rest of the building -- whole portions of the building -- can be completely shut down so that they're not consuming energy.

So you know, really paying attention to the design of the manufacturing and operating process so it all works together to only use energy where it's needed, when it's needed.

And the other aspect of that toner that use less of it to make a print, so not only does it take less energy to manufacture, it uses less material to do the print on the paper also. So that also reduces energy.

TH: OK. So when you talked about the ways in which Xerox was able to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, I sort of see these actions as both operational and innovation-based.

In terms of operations, I know that there was a lot of consolidation of multifunction equipment, and you also do this for your clients. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

PC: So that's a combination of actually operations and innovation.

The innovation portion of that is that our products' technology has involved from an analog printing technology to digital, so now we have what are called multifunction device products. What a multifunction device can do is copy, scan, print, fax, whereas in the past, you would need separate machines to do printing, a different machine to do copying, a different one to do scanning.

The multifunction products do all of that. So, because they can do all of that, what we do is we -- within our own operations, and now we're doing this with customers -- can replace a whole bunch of individual machines, (both) personal and what we call single-function devices, with one multifunction device which can reduce the amount of energy that's consumed by those machines by 50 percent.

And if the machines they're replacing aren't Energy Star-approved, and we're replacing them with a multifunction product that is Energy Star-approved, we can actually save up to 70 percent energy consumption. That translates into greenhouse gas savings also, because consuming energy is where a lot of greenhouse gas emissions are generated.

So our technology in the multifunction world, we've implemented within our own facilities and our own offices, and are now doing that with our customers to help reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

They also enable us, and our customers, to use a scan and then e-mail, so rather than having to print out a document and put it in the Postal Service, you can scan in a document and e-mail it where you want to go. So again, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases from transporting mail to the locations where you want them to go.

TH: Could you give me an example of how Xerox has made this work for one of your clients?

PC: Sure. We have a major, very large customer who we did an assessment of their operations worldwide, and found out that they had 16,000 printers, and what we've found is is over a period of five years, they were spending $100 million just on their printing processes associated with those 16,000 printers. Following the assessment that we did, they reduced the number of devices to 5,000 multifunction products, and reduced the cost of their printing by 20 percent to 30 percent.

So it was a really huge win-win, both reducing the amount of energy that they consume; the greenhouse gas emissions that they generate; and reducing the cost of their document and management processes.

TH: Can you just talk about some of the other environmentally driven initiatives that the company has underway?

PC: Sure. In terms of our commitment to remanufacturing and recycling, it really links to that we comprehend the impacts of our products over the entire life cycle; and when I say that, that means we think about what are the environmental impacts of our supply chain as well as what we do, and then what happens in our customer's site; and then, ultimately, to our products when they're no longer useful to the customer, and making sure that we think about what we're calling end-of-life in the design of our products to make sure that products can be reused. So, for example, we get back our copy and print cartridges to remanufacture them, so we design them so that we can remanufacture them.

We design the cartridges and our machines so that when they can no longer be remanufactured that all the parts and pieces can be recycled; and we mark them so that we know what sort of material is in them, or a recycler knows what material's in them so that they can actually separate them the way that you would, you know, in your blue bin that we'd have plastics separated from - you know, the No. 1s from the No. 2s, for example.

In terms of the paper and the innovations -- yes, we do have a very strong commitment to innovations in the green space. We did announce the erasable paper, which hasn't yet been commercialized.

But this is an innovation where, when we studied paper, what we found is that about 45 percent of the prints that customers generate - or that we generate ourselves -- make it into the recycling waste stream within 24 hours of being printed. So we said, "Oh, if we could make it so that these are reusable, that would be ideal."

So our technologists innovated a process where you can print a page and, within 24 hours, the print on the page disappears and then you can simply put that piece of paper right back into your printer and print again. So that's really neat.

Another area in paper that we announced just a few months ago is our high-yield paper, which conventional paper only uses 45 percent of the tree to make the paper versus our high-yield paper, which uses 90 percent of the tree in the paper itself.

The paper's lighter so that when you mail it, there's less impact on the environment as well as cost to mail it, and it also uses less energy to manufacture that paper. There are less emissions to air and water, and because it's manufactured in a facility that uses hydropower, there's over 70 percent less greenhouse gas emission.

So those are a couple of innovations that we really get excited about.

TH: Can you tell us how the company plans to reach this more stringent greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal?

PC: So because we've met our original goal early, and we actually exceeded our 10 percent, we've now established a new target to achieve a 25 percent reduction by 2012. Again (it's) over the same baseline year of 2002.

So that means we have to have an incremental 7 percent in addition to maintaining the 18 percent we've already achieved, and offsetting any growth that we achieve over that time frame, so it's pretty aggressive.

And some of the ways that we, you know, hope to achieve that - again, we set it as a challenging target - is that, first of all, some of the initiatives that we've already invested in and started to implement that I talked about earlier, in terms of operational improvements and the innovations in our toner technologies, and the innovations in our remote diagnostics and sensing in our machines and greater reliability. We expect that those will continue to deliver us more substantial savings.

Some of the other things that we're looking at are, for example, more energy efficient vehicles, particularly in the United States. In Europe, we've already recently gone to most of our vehicles are not only diesel, but also now starting to look at hybrid diesel.

So we'll continue on those paths and expect to achieve those greater and greater reductions; and again, with our new innovative toner now starting to increase, it will start to replace the conventional toner, so that will start to deliver us more and more savings in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

TH: Now looking back at all the things that the company has done to address its greenhouse gases, which actions would you say were the most challenging, and why?

PC: Why, that's a great question. I think that the actions that relied on innovation are probably the most challenging, but they're also some of the more exciting areas that particularly our technologists really get energized about.

So those are the ones that things like our toner technologies, which are challenging because they are innovation-based; and then some of the service productivity, in terms of our better call management.

Another one that I didn't talk about that we'll be doing more and more is using GPS-type technology to manage our service fleet and population in terms of better call management.

So I think those are some of the more challenging. I think as we get more and more employees energized around these initiatives, we're seeing it sorta take on a life of its own, and each individual starts to recognize that their contributions are significant if they're added up with the contributions from other individuals.

So as we get more and more employees involved, we tend to find that we get new ideas, as well just a recognition that some simple things that you can do yourself go a long way.

TH: And how did you get that buy-in from employees? How did you get them to get on board?

PC: Well, in things like this -- situations where employees actually can contribute directly -- I think people get very energized by that. I think it's in situations where you have a goal in the corporation that people feel like they don't necessarily have a direct relationship with it, they have a hard time really sort of internalizing (it).

But areas such as reducing our greenhouse gas emissions that are directly linked with energy consumption and helping each individual employee understand how they can contribute to reducing that energy consumption by turning off lights, powering down their computers -- those kinds of things.

In fact, it takes very little to get people excited about because they know that they can contribute, and they feel good about that. So these are areas that everybody - each and every employee - can actually wrap their arms around and feel like they're part of.

So it doesn't take a whole lot of convincing. You create the ideas and the challenges, and people run with them; and they start doing these things in their own homes too.

Some examples that we've been told is some of the people who are on, you know, the teams are going home and putting sensors in their homes, in their closets; putting up little windmills in their backyards, and things like that. So they get very excited about it.

TH: We just talked about some of the more challenging things that the company has done to address reductions, but what about the low-hanging fruit? When you look back at everything the company has done, which things would you consider to be the low-hanging fruit?

PC: Oh, I think that there are just so many low-hanging fruit, right from turning off lights or having sensors that sense when somebody's in the room and not, which automatically will shut down lights.

Making sure that your office equipment Energy Star features are enabled because, again, then they automatically will go into their sleep modes and not be consuming energy unnecessarily. Implementing our digital controls -- again, so that the buildings are heated and cooled only when necessary. And lighting - just very simply making sure that you're using energy efficient lighting such as compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs, those kinds of things.

Those are pretty easy things that you can get quick payback on and aren't very difficult to implement.

TH: Knowing what you know now, is there anything that you think the company would have done differently to try to drive these emissions reductions?

PC: Well, I think actually we've done a great job. I think the fact that we exceeded the target early would say that we're pretty pleased with the way that we actually approached this.

I'm sure that there are some lessons that we've learned that we're incorporating into the next generation, but for the most part, we - you know - we feel really good about - you know, you don't always end up heading in the direction that you hoped, and in this case, we got there and then some.

So I think we're pretty happy. We'd probably do it pretty much the same way over again.

TH: And when you talk about there being lessons that will probably be included in the next round, can you think of any off the top of your head?

PC: So I think getting more employees involved is a lesson that we've learned, don't underestimate the power of the individual and the creativity that you can generate as a result. I think that that's a very important one. That's probably one of the most important ones that we learned.

TH: I would imagine that the company, you know, approaching this new, more stringent goal has a lot more confidence now that it's already surpassed its original goal six years early.

Can you tell me what advice would you offer to other companies who are maybe thinking about laying out a pretty ambitious goal like this that might seem somewhat overwhelming. What advice would you give to other companies?

PC: Well, I think the best advice is don't limit yourself. I think we all tend to get nervous when we set a goal and then we don't need it, but I think probably many of us have grown up with parents who have said, "If you set your goals high, you're gonna achieve more than if you limit those goals."

So I would say don't be shy about setting a lofty goal; and if you don't make it, that's O.K., because you'll probably exceed where you would have thought you could have been.

The second thing is is that, you know, look at the simple things. Do the easy things first. Grab that low-hanging fruit. Demonstrate the results, both from the environment as well as the financial benefits, and that will create an engine for more creativity and enthusiasm to take you further.

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