A year in the life at HP: What matters to its sustainability lead in May 2026?

When it comes to technological innovation, ensuring your value chain—from manufacturing to logistics—is good for the planet is no easy feat. Nevertheless, savvy companies know that pursuing sustainability is crucial and HP is no exception. For our second installment of our year-in-the-life series, Fortune spoke with Nancy Powell, manager for sustainability for the UK&I and EMEA markets on how to go green, in spite of the challenges. Priorities: What’s your big focus for 2026? Empowering customers with more sustainable choice. Sustainability is often a set of public targets, which you put on a timeline horizon and then galvanize the business to move towards that. And many businesses, I think, have thought about it very much as their own performance: how do we get from here to that public target? The big movement that we’re part of at the moment is how sustainability solves a problem for the customer. It’s not just a question of how we bake sustainability into our hardware and software before handing it over, but how we think about it from manufacturing through to delivery, from how they’re using it to how they dispose of it. It’s no longer a side program; it’s about how sustainability is valuable to our customers. At a very basic level, many of our customers will have their own targets that they’re trying to meet. So, when they look at where that carbon footprint comes from, they’ll look at all the things influencing that, and they’ll see that their tech, hardware and choices are a chunky bit of that pie. There are also efficiency choices and value choices that they want to make. They’re weighing up performance and cost, but they’re also trying to think about the energy consumption of the hardware, so their bills are going down. 84HP rank on Fortune 500 When we give customers a product, we’re also handing them a packaging problem to solve. If we give them multiple different materials wrapped in multiple different ways,