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WP.6, Standards and Circular Economy, 27 September 2023
Needs for standards on circular economy and incorporating a gender perspective
Link to the presentation
Speaker bio
Mercedes works as Sr. Program Manager within the Industry Standards Program Office at HP Inc., where she focuses on standardization on emerging technologies and sustainability matters. Based in Belgium, Mercedes holds the Chairmanship of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 ‘Information Technology’ Belgium Mirror Committee, and she manages HP’s efforts on European standards policy.
Before joining HP in 2022, Mercedes worked as Project Manager in CEN and CENELEC, the European Standards Organizations. In her role, she was responsible for monitoring and fostering relationships with Technical Bodies and experts developing standards in the fields of energy, material and energy efficiency as well as smart activities to ensure timely and successful delivery of solutions to stakeholders needs.
Mercedes holds a degree on Industrial Engineering – Specialized in Electricity and a master’s degree on Renewable Energies and Energy Sustainability.
Presentation summary
The Senior Program Manager Industry Standards of HP, Ms. Mercedes Mira Costa, underlined that sustainability standards and the importance of incorporating a gender perspective in the development of these standards is very relevant to HP. The extraction and processing of materials, fuels and food make up about half of the total greenhouse emissions and more than 90 per cent of biodiversity loss and water stress. HP has a long-standing history of commitment to climate action, and, by 2030 HP’s climate action mission is to take urgent and decisive action to achieve net zero carbon emissions across our entire value chair, give back more to forests than we take, and innovate their products and services for a more circular economy. Standards play an essential role in driving sustainability and circular economy.
Circularity is a way to achieve a responsible consumption and production in support of the Sustainable Development Goal 12. HP has set a goal to reach 75 per cent circularity for products and packaging by 2030. She underlined that standardization has historically focused on energy efficiency during the use-phase. However, the current focus of attention is on the development of more sustainable products by extending their lifetime, ability to reuse components or recycle materials from products at the end-of-life and use or reuse and/or recycled materials in products. Standards are required at each step of the product lifetime to ensure that components can be recovered and maintained in the economy. A number of circular economy and material efficiency standards have been developed which provide methods to assess the material efficiency of energy related products and others are under developments, such as methods to actually achieve the circular design of products.
The key factors for gender-responsive circular economy standards require diversity in the standards development which will help to produce standards that suit the needs of everybody. For this, it is important to understand the impact and needs of gender differences of the resulting products and ensure a gender lens for physiological, physical as well as socially constructed roles of the impact that climate change has in men versus women. HP is committed to continue to improve the representation of women at HP in key technical areas such as technical and leadership positions.