Based in Austin, Texas, Dell has a rich history of supply chain and packaging innovation.

As part of
its commitment to ocean health outlined at the 2017 United Nations Ocean Conference, Dell pledged
to source and incorporate 10 times its current annual ocean plastic usage into its packaging,
amounting to up to 160,000 pounds annually, by 2025.
More than 8 million tons of plastic enters the ocean each year, a growth rate that by 2050 would result
in more plastic in the ocean than fish. Dell’s strategy to tackle this looming environmental crisis is to
create a supply chain that intercepts land-based mismanaged waste within 50 kilometres of the shore,
thereby targeting plastic at its highest economic value and addressing the root cause of ocean plastic
early in its life cycle. Dell named this initiative Ocean-bound Plastic recycling.
Dell is trying to develop an innovative logistical solution that would be having strategic relevance by
decreasing health-related costs while increasing cost-effectiveness of interventions. The outcome of this
innovative intervention was a new cost-effective supply chain, thus saving $350,000+ in a year.
Following are the considerable propositions in the Dell’s logistics intervention that makes them
pioneer in this field of Ocean plastic recycling and delivers paramount importance to the value chain:

 A scalable and cost-effective supply chain that sources ocean plastic from Southeast Asia,
reducing raw material costs up to 73 percent while diversifying the supplier network
 Reduced manufacturing costs by 51 percent with a sourcing allocation strategy, allowing Dell
to effectively remove the equivalent of 3.6 million plastic bottles from the ocean annually
 Delivers scalability with the production capacity to source nearly 500 times Dell’s
commitment of ocean plastic usage, or the equivalent of 1.8 billion plastic bottles annually. It
also reduced the total landed cost of ocean plastic by 73 percent over the current state, and by
31 percent and 16 percent against prevailing recycled and virgin plastic prices
 Co-location of manufacturing of XPS-13-inch packaging tray with sourcing (in India and
Indonesia) reduced manufacturing costs
Along with the above-mentioned interventions that Dell introduced in their Logistics, they went one
step ahead and tried creating three decision points that will lay the foundation for future innovations
in this field of Ocean-bound plastic recycling:
1. Delivering Additionality: Incorporating improvements to the existing informal waste-
collection economy through fair wages and improved working conditions with increase
demand for lower value plastic by region. Dell also planned to incorporate education and
awareness program into its additionality strategy. Dell also hoped to direct some of its
industrial plastic waste into the supply chain to smooth variability in ocean plastics collection
yields and to ensure that Dell’s own manufacturing by-products did not enter waste streams
that were at risk of leaking into the ocean.
2. Developing future use cases: Developing sustainable solutions by integrating the recycled
plastic into core products like monitors, desktops and utilising it in facilities and other
manufacturing activities. This approach is also known as closed-loop plastic recycling. They
also have plans to incorporate ocean plastics directly into its input peripherals in the
upcoming future.
3. Creating the Consortium: Prior organizations developed small scale versions of an ocean
plastic s supply chain, but often charged a steep premium for resin due to lack of meaningful
demand. Dell figured out that consortium was the missing piece from prior efforts that could
not scale beyond limited edition products. Thus, Dell approached other big corporations like
General Motors, P&G etc. to form a consortium called NextWave which will work towards
changing some of the dynamics towards the recycling of plastic and its use.