Mary Jacques on Lenovo's Circular Economy Principles

As Lenovo's Executive Director of Global ESG and Regulatory Compliance, Mary Jacques leads the company’s ESG initiatives and oversees regulatory compliance efforts.

In this capacity, she champions the transition to a circular economy through the integration of post-consumer recycled content into Lenovo products and packaging, ensures the implementation of robust regulatory compliance programmes and closely mentors emerging technology talent. 

Mary's team spearheads Lenovo’s corporate climate change strategy, water resilience policies and ESG data disclosures, collaborating closely with the supply chain and other partners to advance sustainability.

What's more, as Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Lenovo Foundation, Mary collaborates with the global philanthropy team to encourage charitable investments, employee engagement and disaster response initiatives.

Mary started out at IBM as an Engineer in the Corporate Environmental Affairs business within its Engineering Center for Environmentally Conscious Products. Prior to joining Lenovo in 2006, she later served as the Environmental, Health and Safety Risk Manager at MIT.

Mary holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science and Policy and a Master's in the area of Environmental Management in Resource Economics and Policy – both from Duke University.

What are Lenovo’s sustainability goals?

At Lenovo, we’ve been measuring and reporting our ESG progress for almost two decades. 

Using our ISO 14001 Environmental Management System as our framework, we’ve been setting environmental targets and measuring our progress annually for more than 20 years. We built upon this foundation and expanded our focus to address critical ESG topics including climate change, key social goals like, philanthropy and D&I, and governance topics like ethics and compliance. 

In the area of climate change, we have quite a bit of experience setting long term targets and measuring and reporting our progress on an annual basis. In fact, we met our first set of climate goals for 2020 a year early and have been working towards our latest SBTi-validated net-zero climate goals since they were approved in 2023.

Setting meaningful, relevant targets is not something new to us. We have a lot of experience in driving programs to support our goals, but our journey continues to evolve. We need to continually evaluate our focus to ensure what we’re doing addresses our biggest areas of impact, align our priorities and ensure we’re able to measure and report our progress in a meaningful way. The path for many of these goals is really long and we need to work with our entire value chain including our customers, suppliers and employees to achieve our sustainability goals. 

Regarding climate change mitigation, our latest generation of targets have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) to their Net-Zero standard, which means we’re aligned to what the science says needs to be done to limit global warming to 1.5°C by 2050. 

In addition, we’ve updated our near-term targets to address our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, which include the emissions of our value chain. Currently, we are on track to achieve our 2030 emissions reduction goals and we’re working closely with partners across the business and across our value chain to try to drive continued progress towards our collective goals. 

Beyond climate change, our sustainability focus includes other important topics including supporting a transition to a circular economy in our products and operations. This includes everything from our products to our services, like asset recovery or Certified Refurbished options. 

We’re focused on using more recycled content in our devices as well as making it easier for our customers to repair and ultimately recycle them at the end of their useful life. We have used more than 140 million kilograms of net recycled plastic thus far, as well as nearly 25 million kilograms of closed-loop recycled content. 

In the data centre, innovations such as our Neptune Liquid Cooling Solution are enabling up to a 40% reduction in power consumption, while our Lenovo Asset Recovery service helps customers publish refurbished and recertified enterprise hardware for less, which helps to cut e-waste. 

Tell us about Lenovo’s vision to achieve net zero by 2050 

The call to action to address climate change impacts is one of the biggest challenges facing us as a corporate citizen today, but it comes with huge potential opportunities in addition to the obvious challenges. 

There's a huge opportunity for us to work across our value chain and partner with our customers and suppliers to help them meet their climate change goals. In fact, mitigating these value chain emissions is one of the biggest aspects of our net-zero Scope 3 targets, encompassing more than 99% of our total emissions. What this means is that no organisation, no matter how large, can go it alone.

Net zero will require organisations to work together not just with our value chain partners, but also with other important stakeholders like governments, NGOs and other organisations across all sectors of the economy. We’re driving innovative new approaches to these collaborations, including incentivising our suppliers to join us in committing to SBTi targets and developing new tools like our LISSA AI-powered sustainability engine which helps empower Lenovo account teams to have data-driven discussions with customers around their IT purchasing decisions.

Central to Lenovo’s sustainability journey is our commitment to measurable and meaningful progress. We’re seeing growing maturity in this area in recent years and an understandable sensitivity to greenwashing. It continues to be critical that we come together to pursue collective goals, use common standards and a common set of terminology, goals and measures. Many companies have made some really ambitious commitments and many are really meaningful, but without the backing of a standard or the science, it’s hard to compare and make sure everyone is on the same path.

We chose to align with the SBTi. Aligning goals with the SBTi isn’t an easy process – it took us several years. Setting these types of goals requires having both historic data to set a good baseline and also an effective way to measure your impact and your improvements going forward. This involves a lot of data coming from many different sources, all of which has to be analysed and verified. Aligning to standards like the SBTi’s Net-Zero Standard allows us to disclose our climate goals and data in a way that allows for a clear understanding of our commitment and impact. The more organisations can standardise on common disclosures and common goals, the more we can make progress. 

Why should circular economy principles be at the forefront of production? 

Lenovo has been using post-consumer recycled plastics in products since 2008 and we are firm believers in incorporating circular economy principles into product design and production. The opportunities presented by a circular economy approach are huge. 

At present, the world produces as much as 50 million tonnes of e-waste per year and just 20% of this is formally recycled, according to the UN. This same report found that the annual value of e-waste globally is more than US$62.5bn. There is a big opportunity for us to leverage circular design and production practices to try to improve these numbers and capture this feedstock to make new products.

At Lenovo, our commitment to circular economy principles begins during the design phase where we make decisions to help improve circularity by ensuring that devices can be reused, repaired, refurbished and recycled as much as possible - alongside ‘as-a-Service’ approaches which enable devices to be shared and leased. We design products to ensure that they can be repaired and kept in service for as long a time as possible and also continue to research new recycled materials and how to introduce these into our products. 

What does taking a 'holistic approach' to sustainable packaging mean in practice and why is it important? 

It’s important to take an overview of the impact of sustainable packaging, as it can have several aspects, each of which is important. The first step is to make sure we are not overpackaging and to minimise the amount of materials we use in packaging without impacting our ability to protect our products. Next we look at the materials we are using and try to maximise the amount of recycled and recyclable materials we use in our packaging. We also consider innovative new materials that provide strong performance and environmental features, including biobased fibre to replace plastic.

For example, when we switched to lighter bamboo and sugarcane fibres to ship memory cards and ThinkPad models, we were able to make the packaging lighter and reduce the CO₂ emissions from transportation.

It’s important for sustainability leaders to take a step back and look at the full picture, taking in everything from the use of bio-based and recycled materials to reducing the size of packaging to increasing the use of bulk and reusable packaging solutions. 

At Lenovo, we have ambitious goals for sustainable packaging going forward. By 2025, we will use recycled materials in 90% of plastic packaging for PCs and 60% of smartphone packaging, along with plastic-free packaging for certain products. We are also using 50% less single-use plastics in our smartphone packaging and simultaneously reducing the volume of our smartphone packaging by 10% – a truly holistic approach.

Please outline Lenovo’s latest advancements in sustainable design

We’ve been focused on including post-consumer recycled content in our products for many years and we are trying to ensure that our adoption of post-consumer recycled materials is not something we do in one or two niche products where we showcase some cool new material. We are using post-consumer recycled content at volume, across entire platforms, and trying to achieve high levels of use of both post-consumer recycled plastic and more recently in the past seven years we’re focussing specifically on closed loop recycled plastic sourced from end of life electronic and IT waste streams. 

We’ve used closed-loop recycled content plastic in laptops, desktops, workstations, monitors and accessories and are using it in more and more products every year. We’re also focused on making sure our products have as long a useful life as possible by focusing on repairability.

Our latest ThinkPad T14 and T16 products have enhanced repairability features, the availability of replacement parts like batteries with cable-free connectors for customer repairs and providing videos and visual markings to assist customers in making repairs.

What does the future hold for sustainability at Lenovo?

We are determined not to rest on our laurels – we are currently on track to hit our climate targets for both 2030 and 2050, and we’ll adjust our targets if our business or the science changes.

We also need to be mindful of the sustainability impacts – positive and potentially negative – associated with the rapid adoption of AI, specifically considerations related to diversity, responsibility and environmental impacts. We’re joining with others to express our support of best practices in this area and, in February, Lenovo committed to UNESCO's Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence to commit to ethical and responsible AI.

A crucial part of this is to ensure that as AI is adopted for different solutions, it is fed with inclusive data sets to ensure that a diverse background of people is in the training dataset. Lenovo is supporting the work of Cercle InterL and the Women & AI Charter to ensure fairer and more representative AI and our own Responsible AI Committee works to ensure our approach to AI is guided by diversity and inclusion, as well as considering potential environmental and other social impacts.

We are working to ensure AI can be used as a tool to drive better sustainability decisions - our Services and Solutions Group (SSG) unveiled LISSA, a generative-AI-powered sustainability advisor, which helps customers understand the carbon impact of IT purchasing decisions, among other factors. 

An ongoing challenge that particularly excites me is our drive to increase the representation of women at all levels within Lenovo. This year we achieved 29% of women in technical teams, an industry-beating figure, and we are working to achieve 27% representation of women around the world and 35% of historically excluded talent in the US. 

What advice would you give other sustainability leaders?

The first piece of advice I’d give is to be real and to commit your efforts where you can make a real difference. Greenwashing is easy to spot so prioritise where you can make an impact, put your energy into making that impact and go out there with deep messages that are backed up with real, evidenced facts which you can share with the public. 

When it comes to improving sustainability, it pays to take a look at the whole organisation or process or lifecycle of whatever you’re trying to address. So, for example, the challenge is not just how to improve the energy efficiency of a product, but how to improve the way it is shipped, its packaging and how it is recycled at the end of its life. Taking stock of where you can have the biggest impact, understanding what you can do to make things better and challenging yourself to be honest about your results – those are the fundamentals to being able to prioritise and focus your efforts on what matters.

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