Environmental Leader

Earth Day posts on blogs like The Consumerist and Gizmodo (the photo is from Gizmodo) prompted Dell to dispatch a packaging analysis team to meet with the vendor that shipped a flash drive to a customer in a box “that could probably hold 1,000 flash drives,” according to one blog post.

The move points to the influence bloggers have with the growing number of green-minded consumers. Online buzz around sustainability grew 50 percent in 2007. A new report from IBM reported on today finds that CEOs believe customer expectations around corporate social responsibility are increasing, and CSR will play an important role in differentiating an enterprise in the future.

Some fixes that Dell has responded with include a directive to use envelopes for small items such as these and the use of smaller boxes.

Best of all, Dell says it will implement “Dell-defined volumetric metrics on void space in the package to be incorporated into our periodic vendor business reviews.” Now, we’re not sure if this has anything to do with determining the Jacobian transformation matrix J between Cartesian, spherical and natural coordinates, but we suspect it has something to do with using more sustainable packaging when possible.

Dell explains that while items such as flash drives shipped by third parties make up a small portion of Dell’s overall shipping volume, they now realize customers would rather forego over-sized boxes (that are so yesterday) for today’s under-sized items.

Dell encourages customers to continue to post feedback on any of Dell’s green-focused Direct2Dell blogs, or other ideas on IdeaStorm.

Perhaps Dell’s sustainability team would be interested in DuPont’s Jonathan Cohen explaining his company’s goal of developing sustainable solutions for the packaging industry.