Innovation & Technology Circular Economy

Logitech Boosts Product Circularity, Shares Design Principles with Industry

To drive industry-wide carbon reduction, Logitech is sharing its design principles and tools with any organizations in the consumer-tech industry looking to boost their sustainability efforts.

Published 10 months ago | About a 4 minute read

Image: Logitech

Today, Logitech announced that all of its video-collaboration devices that run on the CollabOS operating system will now be manufactured with next-life plastics. Existing products Rally Bar, Rally Bar Mini, Tap IP, Tap Scheduler and Scribe are being refreshed with materials that lower the carbon impact of each product.

“By transitioning our portfolio of conference room devices to a lower product carbon footprint, we are helping other companies navigate their sustainability challenges,” said Logitech COO Prakash Arunkundrum. “We’re not only designing and manufacturing new products with recycled plastic and other lower-carbon materials, but refreshing existing products to provide IT leaders with a new way to evaluate their workplace technology investment in conference room systems — one that includes people and planet. We do this without increasing prices or compromising the highest quality and performance companies expect from Logitech.”

Reducing negative environmental impact has rapidly become a business imperative. In a recent survey of IT professionals by analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, 65 percent say that becoming a leader in ESG and sustainability practices is a critical or very important business objective in the coming year.

Applying Logitech’s Design for Sustainability (DfS) principles to its video-collaboration portfolio means that Logitech customers can outfit entire conference rooms — including Microsoft Teams rooms and Zoom rooms — with technology designed with sustainability in mind. This development expands on the same improvements already implemented in personal workstation peripherals including webcams, headsets, mice and keyboards.

Design for Sustainability

A key tenet of DfS is the use of circular materials that can be recovered from the waste stream and given a second life, including post-consumer recycled plastics (PCR) that Logitech calls “next-life plastics.”

Newer conference room products such as Logitech Sight use:

Minimum of 50 percent certified recycled plastic
21 percent reduction in carbon footprint (compared to a ‘doing nothing’ design scenario)
1,400tCO2e avoided carbon per 100,000 units (enough to drive around the Earth approximately 131 times†)

Logitech video-conferencing products now have:

Low-carbon aluminum made with renewable energy, rather than fossil fuels
Packaging from FSC®-certified forests and other controlled sources
100 percent recycled fabrics in the Rally Bar family
Option to collect and recycle old video-conferencing equipment via Logitech Select
Power-saving modes that can potentially reduce Rally Bar and Rally Bar Mini’s carbon impact by 1.65 tons of CO2 equivalent*

Increasing the amount of recycled and next-life materials in its products is the latest step Logitech is taking to decrease their footprint and increase their circularity — in May 2023, the company partnered with global repair community iFixit to extend the useful life of its products by increasing availability of spare parts, supporting beyond-warranty repair on select products, and developing relevant guides to support these repairs.

Opening access for greater impact

Logitech says DfS has helped it decrease its Scope 3 emissions by 21 percent, pushing it toward its goal of removing more carbon than it creates by 2030.

To drive carbon reduction at an even bigger scale and stimulate industry-wide progress, Logitech is openly sharing its DfS principles, tools and knowledge of how to incorporate more sustainable materials in the manufacturing process with any organizations in the consumer-tech industry looking to boost their sustainability efforts. For a consultation on how to incorporate more sustainable materials into your manufacturing process, contact [email protected].

Transparency and accountability

As more companies hold themselves accountable for measurably reducing their carbon impact, they increasingly seek out technology vendors who provide transparency via key performance indicators, reporting and third-party certifications. Logitech — which in 2020 became the first consumer electronics company to provide detailed carbon-impact labeling on product packaging — says it is on track to achieve its 2025 target of having a product carbon footprint for every product in its portfolio, making it easier for company technology buyers to make informed decisions about — and report on — the scope of their impact when outfitting their global workforces for meeting rooms, personal workstations, flex desking, etc.

Availability

Logitech business products made with next-life plastic, and their availability, can be found here. For more information on the Logitech Select collect-and-recycle program, contact [email protected].

*Based on energy-saving mode switched on an EnergyStar-certiﬁed, 50- to 69-inch, low-energy television baseline — a global electricity consumption emissions factor from Logitech’s Carbon Clarity program. Internal estimates of pre-optimization use-phase carbon impact of 95.4t CO2e for each 100 products used over a period of 2 years. Logitech’s internal user model for room VC equipment (based on recorded data from VC room usage).

† US EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator