There has been much talk about building a sustainable future for the past decade. Everyone wants it – from progressively minded companies to the activists on the street – but the topic of sustainability still often feels like an amorphous subject mostly discussed in vague, often immeasurable declarations.
At Seagate, sustainability is integrated into every aspect of Seagate’s business, from our research and development efforts, manufacturing processes and community involvement, to initiatives around conflict minerals, energy efficiency, sustainable transportation and packaging, water management and a healthy work environment.
We’ve been practicing these initiatives for a number of years and want to reassert Seagate’s commitment to environmental sustainability and recognize all the work that our employees do to integrate sustainable practices across all our operations.
While a range of programs and activities support Seagate’s commitment to sustainability, our strategy focuses on three key priorities: reducing energy usage, reducing carbon emissions, and more efficient management of waste and water.
Reducing Energy Usage
Manufacturing our products and providing our services uses energy and produces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To combat these realities, Seagate reduces the amount of energy and carbon required to produce disk drives by identifying energy efficiency opportunities, auditing management systems and performance and reporting on progress throughout the manufacturing process.
Across our industry, these measurements are known as “energy intensity” and “GHG emissions intensity” because they measure impact relative to the amount of economic activity taking place. This is done by measuring energy and carbon emissions intensity per Exabyte (EB) of storage capacity shipped. In 2015, we reduced our energy intensity by 11 percent compared to the previous year, demonstrating continued progress in electricity use per storage capacity shipped.
Reducing Carbon Emissions
Our two largest sources of GHG emissions are purchased electricity and “fugitive emissions,” or the unintended release of gases. To drive down GHG emissions intensity, each Seagate manufacturing site is required to achieve annual energy efficiency goals. We also conduct third-party verification of our GHG emissions reporting every year.
In addition to keeping track of factory performance for our own records (compiled annually in the Global Citizenship Annual Report), we share our results via the Carbon Disclosure Project Supply Chain and Investor Questionnaires.
Improving Waste Management
Waste is an inevitable part of any manufacturing process. Over the last decade, Seagate has established systems to track, manage and report waste at every one of our factories around the world. Our facilities identify and implement waste minimization initiatives with the goal of preventing waste from being produced, and recycling or reusing waste whenever possible. In addition, we have a “zero-landfill” policy related to hazardous waste, and only send this to facilities that have been audited to Seagate standards to certify that these facilities have appropriate disposal methods to minimize environmental impact.
As one of the most advanced manufacturers in the world, Seagate strives to improve environmental sustainability in all of the communities it operates in. We strongly believe that it is our responsibility to our stakeholders to effectively manage our products’ and operations’ environmental impacts. We trust that our efforts, both large and small, can make a difference in the communities that we operate in.
