Dell Adds Ocean Plastics to its Packaging

As environmental leaders around the world continue to put the onus of product recycling back on waste generators, Dell Inc., is taking another step along its own path to a circular economy by adding ocean plastics to its packaging.

Last week, Round Rock, Texas-based Dell announced it will keep 16,000 pounds of plastics out of the ocean and in the economy by mixing it in a 1:3 ratio with recycled HDPE plastics to make a new packaging system for its XPS 13 2-in1 laptop. Overall, 25 percent of the recycled content of the trays will be ocean plastics. Dell hopes to increase the amount to 20,000 pounds of ocean plastics next year and continue to look at how the ocean plastics can be used for both packaging and possibly products in the future.

The company, says Oliver Campbell, the director of procurement & packaging innovation at Dell, took a serious look at ocean plastics when its first social good advocate, actor and entrepreneur Adrian Grenier, helped leadership understand the breadth of challenges our oceans face today.

After collaborating with Grenier, who is best known for his role in the HBO series Entourage, and the Lonely Whale Foundation on “Cry Out – The Lonely Whale VR Experience,” a three-minute underwater VR expedition created by 3D Live with Dell Precision, Alienware, AMD and HTC technology. The experience is almost like a ride, where participants get the sensation of diving deep into the sea and are greeted by shoals of fish – but also by carpets of plastic pollution and the damaging noise of seismic probes.

Then, with more research, says Campbell, the company learned the bleak numbers behind ocean plastics. “There’s approximately 8 million tons of plastic waste going into the ocean every year and that number is increasing. If things don’t change by the year 2050 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. And that is just staggering,” he says.

Although the perception is a large sea of plastics thick enough to walk upon floating in the ocean somewhere, says Campbell, the reality is that once plastics are in the ocean they break down into smaller and smaller pieces, and the ability to recover them is greatly diminished.

“We were dissuaded quite early on in this project that we couldn’t be Jacque Cousteau and National Geographic going out on a ship and collecting ocean plastics. That was my only disappointment in this— that I couldn’t be Jacque Cousteau. But I still think we are doing great things for the ocean.”

So instead, the company is collecting the plastics at its most concentrated point—just before it goes into the ocean. Dell is focusing on Portau-Prince, Haiti, where research showed a large amount of ocean plastics come from. Additional focus is on Southeast Asia in India, Vietnam, China, Indonesia and the Phillipines, which according to a white paper discussing Dell’s approach, have the highest concentrations of land-based ocean plastics and can be viewed as a supply chain network providing substantial materials on a daily basis. The reason for this, Campbell says, is many of these areas lack a formal waste system for handling garbage and recycling.

So, in Haiti, local pickers collect these land-based ocean plastics from beaches, waterways and coastal areas and take them to collection or recycling centers, where the plastic is aggregated and sorted by the waste processors. They are then processed and refined and sent to China where the packaging trays are made. The trays are molded and stamped with an illustration of whales and the #2 recycling symbol. The trays, are curbside recyclable in many communities the company says, with the hopes that they will stay in the loop of the circular economy.

The company has taken a hard look at its packaging, making it a priority in its Dell Legacy of Good goal of 100 percent sustainable packaging by 2020. Campbell says the quality of the mixed plastics works well for packaging and the cost may even be lower than other packaging.

This is not Dell’s first go at recycling, he adds. The technology company has a 10-year history of innovation in recycling and packaging as well as recycled content, such as water bottles in its computer products.

With the goal of the circular economy being to recycle and reuse materials continually, rather than send them to landfill after a single use, Dell’s packaging innovation has lead it to use various sustainable products including wheat straw, bamboo and mushrooms in addition to the ocean plastics. The company says using recycled content materials from various waste streams helps break free of the linear march of materials to landfills when they reach end of life.

Dell also has lead the tech industry in efforts to recycle computer plastic, as it announced in 2015, it was incorporating 2.89 million pounds of that plastic e-waste into its OptiPlex 3030 All-in-One, OptiPlex 3020 and 13 other desktops and monitors. In that effort, the company collected computer plastics in take-back programs it had set up in 78 countries and then shipped to China, where they were shredded, melted and blended with virgin plastic before being molded into new parts. The recycled plastic content averaged 35 percent.