Patty Calkins: Straight to the source

Patty Calkins, Xerox’s vice president of environment, health and safety (EHS) is a scuba diver. During a recent conversation with Sustainable Industries, she talked about a dive in Lake Erie when her equipment failed. She started to lose pressure in her air tank — a serious problem at 120 feet below the surface.

Eyeing her dive computer, Calkins slowly made her way to the surface, careful not to go too high, too fast, which could put her life at risk. A frightening situation, but Calkins says it was an instructive one as well. “What it does teach you is how to keep your head on your shoulders and try to make a very appropriately paced ascent,” she says.

A similar philosophy has grounded Calkins’ work at Xerox (NYSE: XRX) over more than a decade. Her first task at the $15.7 billion company was to conduct a life-cycle assessment, “to understand the primary environmental impacts of using a Xerox product — and to integrate EHS into the design of our products,” she says. After taking stock of the situation, Calkins has helped Xerox introduce a series of programs that seem, so far, to be making that same appropriatepaced ascent.

Her life-cycle assessments demonstrated that paper (along with energy use) was one of the most significant environmental impacts of using Xerox products. Because Xerox is one of the world’s largest retailers of copy paper, “we have obviously some opportunity to leverage that,” Calkins says. So the company set to work redesigning products to simplify double-sided copying and to reduce problems with using recycled content paper.

In 2000, Xerox launched its paper certification program, which it rolled out to its paper and fiber suppliers in 2003. While the company’s policy states a preference for Forest Stewardship Council certification, it allows a range of certifications.

“When you start out something new, you have to realize you can’t get to the end point overnight,” Calkins explains. “So the first step is, let’s just get certification, but then let’s work towards a specific certification. We work with our suppliers to help them understand why this is important, what they would need to do, what our preferences are. … We think that’s better than just saying we’re not going to deal with you.”

The company is also set to announce its next step. Over the next three years, “we’re committing $1 million to work with The Nature Conservancy and the paper supply chain to move forward forestry stewardship practices and to educate and bring these paper suppliers — the whole paper supply chain — toward ... certification,” Calkins says. “It’s a major initiative that we’re really excited about.”

Calkins came to Xerox after getting a taste for tying environmental improvements to the bottom line at AT&T (NYSE: T). Working as a chemist for the telecom giant, Calkins was invited to lead her site’s environmental program in the wake of a hazardous waste violation fine.

“They said, … ‘Would you be willing to take on this challenge?,’” Calkins recalls. “I said, ‘Hmm, I’m always up for a challenge.’ And I’m glad I did. It totally changed my career path.”

Her work at AT&T focused on how to avoid tangling with environmental regulations in the first place. “I was naïve when it came to where does … regulation come from, and I said very quickly, why do we want to deal with this?”

Calkins took her observation straight to the engineering team. “I told them, ‘You’ve got a lot of waste in your process, and that’s not a quality process,’” Calkins says. After that, she continued to ask questions. “I drove people nuts,” she says.

Eventually, AT&T launched its Design for the Environment Program and encouraged Calkins to focus on work at her own site. But Calkins wasn’t ready to narrow down again and readily accepted a job as the manager of resource conservation with Xerox. Thirteen years later, she says it was a good choice. “And I hope Xerox thinks so too,” she quips.

Since Calkins’ arrival, Xerox has whittled away at its environmental impacts. Starting with a commitment to create “waste-free products in wastefree facilities,” Xerox has introduced proprietary ink technologies that create up to 90 percent less consumable waste than a standard laser printer. The company has also adopted a remanufacturing process that takes back its machines, from standard office copiers to 3-ton book printing presses.

According to the newly released “2006 Report on Global Citizenship,” Xerox has reduced its global air emissions by 93 percent since 1991, and it has made continuous improvements in recycling rates, water use reduction and hazardous waste management. “Even as business grows, we continue to reduce,” Calkins says.

To illustrate her point, Calkins turns to Xerox’s greenhouse gas reduction target. In 2002, the company set a goal of 10 percent greenhouse gas reductions by 2012, regardless of growth in the business. To reach its target, Calkins estimates Xerox will need to achieve a 30 percent or more improvement in efficiency.

The benefits have been more than just environmental. “In terms of the remanufacturing initiative, we saved several hundred million dollars a year,” Calkins says. “Of course, up front, we need to design things with a little bit of added cost, for robustness. I’m sure you’re familiar with when you buy consumer products designed for disposability they’re a lot flimsier. To make them more durable, you have to put a little more cost into it. But you save in the long run. It truly is a clear and significant bottom-line benefit.”

Waste, according to Calkins, becomes a financial asset through remanufacturing.

“The financial flows say that the inventory management process and assumptions are based on ... your market demand and what you’re going to get back,” she explains.

The company only buys new what field returns can’t meet.

“When we started looking at where we wanted to be, … we realized that if we did it right the first time, we wouldn’t have problems later,” Calkins says. “It made really good business sense. If you never create that risk, you don’t have to waste those resources.”