Electronic Waste

Turning Trash into Treasures

When Josh Garrison, Worldwide Returns, Cisco, first joined Cisco in 2000, e-waste issues were the furthest thing from his mind.

But as manager of one of Cisco's largest "returns" warehouses, Garrison was responsible for millions of pounds of customer returns each year.

"At the time, we were sending a lot of product to a single-source vendor, but had no visibility and no control over the disposal. Essentially, the vendor could send this material anywhere," he recalls.

High-tech hardware involves more than 1,000 materials, many of which are highly toxic. That Cisco didn't know what was happening to the materials it no longer used bothered Garrison.

Cisco executives like Board Chairman John Morgridge and Randy Pond, senior vice president of Operations, Processes, and Systems, were also concerned. As the harm to the environment of e-waste became increasingly clear, and disposal legislation loomed in Europe, a new approach to the disposal was critical.

Luckily, Garrison was already on it. "Cisco has labs, Networking Academies, and philanthropic organizations that would love to have this product. Throwing it away made no sense when there was this kind of demand on the other side of the company," he says.

His ideas led to a meeting with Pond, who tasked him with developing better disposal programs.

"I was in business school with people from Oracle, Intel, and Sun Microsystems," he says. "When I told them the SVP of Cisco operations had simply asked me, an entry-level manager, what kind of budget I needed, and how many people to address the problem, they were incredulous."

Now, thanks to Garrison and his team—Dane Chopp, Raelene Walters, Gideon Schroeder, Jim Tarsnane and Chris Pratt—Cisco boasts some of the most innovative and effective reuse and recycle programs in the industry. "Scrapping is the last thing we want to do with these products. Today, we have the processes in place to find out if anyone inside Cisco wants or needs it."

And by all accounts, it's highly effective: "We send less than 1.5 percent of returned products to landfill each year now," Garrison says. "By industry standards, that's phenomenal."