Patty Calkins, Xerox

Patty Calkins, Xerox’s vice president of environment, health and safety (EHS) is a scuba diver. During a recent conversation with Sustainable Industries, she talked about a dive in Lake Erie when her equipment failed. She started to lose pressure in her air tank — a serious problem at 120 feet below the surface.

Eyeing her dive computer, Calkins slowly made her way to the surface, careful not to go too high, too fast, which could put her life at risk. A frightening situation, but Calkins says it was an instructive one as well. “What it does teach you is how to keep your head on your shoulders and try to make a very appropriately paced ascent,” she says.

A similar philosophy has grounded Calkins’ work at Xerox (NYSE: XRX) over more than a decade. Her first task at the $15.7 billion company was to conduct a life-cycle assessment, “to understand the primary environmental impacts of using a Xerox product — and to integrate EHS into the design of our products,” she says. After taking stock of the situation, Calkins has helped Xerox introduce a series of programs that seem, so far, to be making that same appropriatepaced ascent.

Her life-cycle assessments demonstrated that paper (along with energy use) was one of the most significant environmental impacts of using Xerox products. Because Xerox is one of the world’s largest retailers of copy paper, “we have obviously some opportunity to leverage that,” Calkins says. So the company set to work redesigning products to simplify double-sided copying and to reduce problems with using recycled content paper.

In 2000, Xerox launched its paper certification program, which it rolled out to its paper and fiber suppliers in 2003. While the company’s policy states a preference for Forest Stewardship Council certification, it allows a range of certifications.

“When you start out something new, you have to realize you can’t get to the end point overnight,” Calkins explains. “So the first step is, let’s just get certification, but then let’s work towards a specific certification. We work with our suppliers to help them understand why this is important, what they would need to do, what our preferences are. … We think that’s better than just saying we’re not going to deal with you.”