Google has announced a series of sustainability commitments for hardware and services, including a pledge that, beginning in 2022, 100% of Made by Google products will include recycled materials. The company did not set a percentage of recycled materials that will be in its products, but rather said that it will push to “maximize recycled content wherever possible.”
The tech giant also pledged that by 2020, all shipments going to or from customers will be carbon neutral, wrote Anna Meegan, Google’s head of sustainability for the Consumer Hardware group, in a blog post this week.
The commitments are building upon the foundation and progress the company has already made. For example, from 2017 to 2018, Google’s carbon emissions for product shipments decreased by 40%. Google has also launched Power Project, which will bring one million energy- and money-saving Nest thermostats to families in need by 2023; much of its Nest product portfolio was made with post-consumer recycled plastic.
Even before the sustainability pledge, individual engineers were tinkering with using recycled plastics in various devices. The new commitments, far from being a burden to them - as they might be because of tight deadlines and the need for a significant amount of experimenting to make the new materials work - are something that are “quite motivating” to engineers, Ana Corrales, chief operating officer for Google hardware, told Fast Company.
