The world's largest laptop company is rolling out new ways to make it easier to repair your devices — even from home — and it'll reward you for recycling your old tech, too.
These are moves that Lenovo, which makes the ThinkPad laptop with that legendary red tracker dot, is putting in place because of the growing consumer demand they're seeing for sustainable tech.
"Our customers are really hungry for more and more information about not just the products that they're buying, but the impact that we can have on their sustainability journey."
That's Mary Jacques, Lenovo's Executive Director of Global ESG and Regulatory Compliance, who's on a mission to lead the brand toward more repairable, reusable, and innovative products — whether that's for its Fortune 500 clients buying laptops for the whole company or individual consumers looking to level up before the school year starts.
We spoke with Jacques and her teammate Kim Fox, who runs point on circularity strategies, about what's going on behind the scenes at Lenovo to deliver sustainable tech to its massive customer base.
💻 Emphasizing returnable and *rentable* tech
"We're really focused on being able to provide devices that can last longer for the consumer," Fox told us. For example, Lenovo has a "device-as-a-service program so [customers] can use a subscription service. Rather than having to buy the devices, [they] can just use the ones that they need."
"And then on the return side, we have consumer trade-in programs in a lot of markets, so they can get value back for their device," Fox said.
Here's how customers can get money for their old tech:
▶️ Go to the Lenovo trade-in website to get a trade-in quote for a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone (often, these don't even have to be Lenovo products)
▶️ Ship your product back (free of charge)
▶️ Get a Visa gift card to use for future device purchases or anything else
♻️ What's repairable, and what's recyclable?
Lenovo recently partnered with computer repair company iFixit to increase the repairability of its ThinkPads. According to Lenovo, by 2025, 84% of repairs can be completed at home without having to send a PC to a service center, and over 75% of repairable PC parts returned to service centers will be repaired for future use.
"I'm really impressed and excited about the work we're doing on repairability," Fox said. "We're really looking holistically at 'what does the customer need in the device in order to make it last longer and be able to repair it?' And then if they can't do it themselves, how do we help them do that?"
"We also participate in a lot of recycling programs around the world," Fox said, "helping to get that material back into the system so that we can use closed-loop recycled plastic [and] recycled metals in our devices."
Since 2020, Lenovo reports it has recycled or reused around 207 million pounds of products from its customers — the weight equivalent of 87 million ThinkPads.
Given that electronic waste contributes to 70% of all toxic waste and only about 12% of all e-waste is recycled properly right now, any action individual consumers can take to repair or recycle their old tech responsibility is a step toward a cleaner, cooler future (plus, that Visa cash doesn't hurt).
🙋 Customers are asking for sustainable products
"Our customers are really hungry for more and more information about not just the products that they're buying, but the impact that we can have on their sustainability journey," said Jacques. "More and more, this is a conversation that we're having with customers about how our products and our expertise and our solutions can help them."
For example, Lenovo recently launched LISSA (Lenovo's Intelligent Sustainability Solutions Advisor), an AI-powered tool that helps its commercial customers "understand what their [sustainability] commitments are, what their real technology needs are, and develop solutions," Jacques said.
Armed with data-driven insights, companies may then decide "they don't necessarily need to purchase products outright, but maybe devices-as-a-service is a better solution for some part of their users. Or maybe refurbished products might be a solution," Jacques noted.
"So we're focused not just on our own actions, but being able to measure them and translate that into data that our customers can use to evaluate us and to evaluate how our products and our services can help them in their journey as well."
🗣️ Radically candid results
"Greenhushing" is greenwashing's younger sibling. While the latter inflates companies' "green" commitments, greenhushing is when companies don't speak out about sustainability for fear of backlash. Jacques and Fox told TCD that transparent communication is inherently part of Lenovo's DNA.
"We're a tech company. We're very engineering-heavy within our organization, so it's been a natural fit for us to really talk about things in terms of measurable goals," said Jacques. "And so we have a history of setting meaningful, measurable targets in this space, starting back in 2010, when we set our first generation of climate change goals."
"We're avoiding the greenhushing because we are measuring what our results are, and we're basing our targets against real measurable outcomes, so it's a fact.
"I think that really helps when you're basing your commitments on something that's measurable and that you can communicate easily," said Jacques. "It's pretty easy to communicate things like the percentage of recycled content in your products or the percentage of parts that come back for repair."
And it's advantageous for Lenovo to lean in here. "All around the world, our customers are demanding, frankly, data on our performance," said Jacques. Customers get a win with increased transparency, and Lenovo gets a win by sharing their progress.
Her guidance for other companies? "Focus on what you can measure. And then that becomes easier to communicate."
💚 What gives you hope in the sustainability space?
"I'm really hopeful, genuinely," Jacques said. "We are in a global organization. We see customers all over the world. And I think it's almost universal at this point that customers are really interested in buying products and partnering with a company that is operating responsibly, that has strong and real and meaningful climate commitments, and that we're making progress on our climate commitments.
"This is not a large company versus consumer thing. It's really across all types of customers and it's really all over the world. And so from my perspective, I'm really optimistic that this is something that is continuing to be very important to our customers around the world."
Anna Robertson conducted this interview for The Cool Down.
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