Environmental activists again took their concerns to the annual Dell Inc. shareholders meeting on Friday, but this year’s conversation was considerably more cordial than the previous one, and certainly more restrained than the rhetoric just one day before the meeting.
On p.27 of last week’s Chronicle, several Austin clergy, in coordination with Texas Campaign for the Environment, signed “An Open Letter to Michael Dell,” a full-page ad blasting the Dell corporation’s record on computer recycling. That was quickly followed by a scathing response to the ministers from Dell’s “sustainable business director,” Pat Nathan, who accused TCE of providing “misinformation” and “distortions” to the clergy and said, “While the activists have been putting on prison costumes and biohazard suits and engaging in media-seeking stunts, we have been hard at work collecting computers to recycle.” (See today’s Postmarks for another Dell reply.)
The next day, in contrast, TCE and allied activists (speaking as proxies for environmentally conscious shareholders) lauded praise upon Michael Dell for the recycling initiatives his company has already taken — including recently switching recycling vendors from the federal prison-labor company UNICOR to more traditional recycling outfits — while gently chiding him to do more. Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition said that his group estimates that Dell has recycled only about 1% of its units sold, leaving a gap of 15 million computers unaccounted for and possibly heading for the waste stream. Dell did not dispute the figure and also agreed with Smith’s assertion that the company would better serve its shareholders by getting in front of the problem with its own solution rather than waiting for lawmakers to impose one. “Legislative solutions don’t encourage innovation or competition,” Dell said.
Last year, shareholders became audibly irritated by the repeated barrage of recycling questions and actually began booing after a few questioners. This year, there was no such obvious venom, although at least one muttered epithet of “environmental crazies” buzzed in the lobby.
Asked if the praise-then-criticize approach was a conscious catering to the audience, Smith said, “We do think they’re starting to respond, and we want to give them credit, but we wanted to also say that these are baby steps. We wanted to recognize this respectfully.”
Afterward, the activists and Dell staff actually worked together to load several Dell waste computers into a recycling truck destined for Image Microsystems, Dell’s new vendor that just pledged to abide by SVTC’s “Recycler’s Pledge of Stewardship.” “We’re not exactly holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya,’ but this is more common ground on recycling than we’ve had for a while,” said TCE Director Robin Schneider.
This article appears in July 25 • 2003.