Lenovo

Challenge

Lenovo is one of the largest Information and Communications Technology (ICT) companies worldwide. It produces a range of products including, among others, computers, smartphones, and servers.

The company has established a comprehensive climate change strategy to drive GHG emissions reductions across strategic areas of impact.

It wanted to better understand its impacts and credibly disclose environmental information about its products. Yet, product carbon footprinting is effort-intensive for ICT products given the long supply chain and rapid product change-over.

Lenovo needed an efficient and credible way to calculate its products’ footprints. To meet this need, it joined the Product Attribute to Impact Algorithm (PAIA) project, an ICT sector-wide pre-competitive collaboration led by Quantis and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to streamline footprinting for ICT products.

Insights

Environmental footprints for ICT products present unique challenges because:

• ICT companies have long and complex value chains, often across different geographies;
• product portfolios tend to be diverse and evolve rapidly; and
• multiple methodologies exist to calculate product footprints.

To address these challenges, Quantis and MIT developed PAIA, an easy-to-use online platform that allows companies to significantly reduce the time and cost of environmental impact calculations. PAIA delivers:

• a streamlined methodology for ICT product footprinting,
• a suite of simplified online tools, and
• a multi-stakeholder initiative of ICT companies that share insights and best practices

To learn more about PAIA, click here.

Actions

Lenovo joined PAIA and began using its tools to calculate the carbon footprint of its desktop, notebook, display, table, All-in-One, thin client, server, and network switch products.

As a PAIA project member, Lenovo also participated in the EU ICT footprint pilot tests. This EU project assesses the compatibility of methodologies for the measurement of the energy consumption and carbon emissions arising from the lifecycle of ICT products.

Impact

Using PAIA to calculate product footprints has significantly reduced the time and cost of environmental footprinting.

The data derived from PAIA tools allows Lenovo to report credibly on its sustainability programs.

The company shares these results with enterprise customers and publishes them publicly on Lenovo Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) Information Sheets.

By participating in PAIA, Lenovo is helping to drive a sector-wide streamlined methodology that will be key to transforming ICT companies into sustainable businesses.

Next steps

PAIA is not only a tool, but also a platform for collaboration between companies, academic experts and other third parties to find better solutions for product environment footprinting. Lenovo looks forward to continuing collaboration through PAIA to develop streamlined methodologies and implement industry best practices.

• Climate

• Information Communication Technology

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