Chinese tech hub and boom town Shenzhen is set to increase the minimum wage of workers there by 13.3 per cent in early 2013, causing a few sweaty palms in the technology supply chain. Shenzhen and the wider Pearl River Delta area in southern China is one of the most concentrated technology manufacturing hubs in [...]

The Coca-Cola Company, Dow Chemical and Duke Energy are among 24 major companies that have agreed to develop a methodology to assign value to the world’s forests, freshwater and marine systems. The Corporate Eco Forum and The Nature Conservancy are leading the Valuing Natural Capital initiative, announced at the United Nations’ Rio+20 Earth Summit. Committed [...]

The packaging for your next computer could be grown, not manufactured. Dell has announced it will be the first technology company to ship a product in an organic, mushroom-based packaging material, which Wired.co.uk covered last year. The biotechnology design uses agricultural waste, like cotton seed, wood fiber and buckwheat hulls, placed in a mould and [...]

Fact: most electronics manufacturers bury their products in excessive amounts of packaging. For proof, look no further than Dell, which managed to eliminate 18.2 million pounds of packaging since 2008 and 8.7 million pounds in the last year alone. So how did they do it? Dell’s reductions are the direct result of focusing on what [...]

Stung by labor shortages and a rash of suicides this year at its massive factories in southern China, Foxconn Technology said Wednesday that it would immediately raise the salaries of many of its Chinese workers by 33 percent. The pay increase is the latest indication that labor costs are rising in China’s coastal manufacturing centers [...]

The computer company Dell is to roll out a mentoring programme in which male senior executives are mentored by female middle managers. The reverse mentoring programme, which was piloted for six months in the EMEA region last year, aims to give male bosses an insight into the challenges women face in the workplace, helping more [...]

Environmental activists are taking to the Internet in a new bid to help save the world’s rainforests with the help of major corporations including Starbucks Corp and Dell Inc. Campaigners plan to announce on Monday the formation of “Team Earth”, a social network that includes businesses, nongovernmental organizations, students and politicians with the hope of [...]

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greenest of them all? Top manufacturers of personal computers in the U.S. — Hewlett-Packard Co, Dell Inc, and fourth-place Apple Inc. — are each claiming to have the “greenest” PCs on the market. The companies are crafting entire business plans around selling their “greenness” to consumers.John Spooner, an [...]

Dell today became the first major computer manufacturer to ban the export of non-working electronics to developing countries as part of its global policy on responsible electronics disposal. Dell’s electronics disposition policy now exceeds requirements of the Basel Convention, which bans the export of certain electronic waste based on its material or chemical composition. By [...]

Innovative green and social products greatly contribute to the ethical reputation of technology hardware companies, while labour, legal, institutional and production-related challenges are rising, states a report published today by Geneva-based research firm Covalence – Covalence Technology Hardware Industry Report 2008. In Covalence cross-sectors EthicalQuote ranking Technology Hardware recently lost the 1st rank against Automobiles [...]