Dell’s FY08 Corporate Responsibility Report

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Recently, we released Dell's latest corporate responsibility report, covering our fiscal year 2008 activities.  A significant amount of work from Dell team members around the globe has produced one of our most comprehensive reports to date—I hope you will take time to read about some of our latest results.  For a quick review, a new executive summary section, as well as letters from Michael Dell and Gil Casellas, our vice president of corporate responsibility, provides an overview of material covered in the report.

We place a significant emphasis on being a responsible company; quite simply we believe we will be most successful in meeting our business objectives when we do so with our obligations to employees, communities and the environment in mind.  Critical to us meeting our responsibility goals is reporting on our progress in a transparent way.
 
Enhancements to this year's report include:

  • We included a new, easy-to-read table at the beginning of the report summarizes our key environmental, supplier and community metrics;
  • We had our greenhouse gas (GHG) emission numbers externally validated, providing further accountability as we strive to make Dell a low-carbon leader.  We also reported the GHG emission impacts of our corporate air travel, the next step in having a complete accounting of Dell's climate impacts.  Our comprehensive climate policy and progress are included in the Environmental Responsibility section of the report;
  • An Emerging Issues sub-section has been added to discuss issues that are either new to Dell or that we are in the infancy of addressing.  This year, we covered HIV/AIDS, Global Citizenship work with suppliers, the technology surrounding nanomaterials, challenges with mining/extractives and the impacts of the retail channel on our climate footprint; and
  • We also added a new Employee section which covers:  Listening to Employees, Ethics Tools for Employees, Diversity and Inclusion, Global Talent Management, Global Health and Wellness (including benefits information) and Employee Engagement in Sustainability.  We are proud of the importance our employees place on our company's environmental and sustainability efforts and this section shows just a few of those efforts.

Seventeen stakeholder organizations provided perspective on Dell's corporate responsibility efforts and those perspectives are included in the report. Their inclusion underscores our commitment both to transparency and to partnership with our stakeholders to help us continually improve our performance.

I invite your review of the report as well as your comments, ideas and challenges as we continue to move Dell forward in our journey of sustainability and responsibility.

About the Author: Wendy Dittmer

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