Supply Chain

 
 


NVIDIA actively pursues social and environmental excellence within our company, which includes our chip and board supply chain operations. We work closely with supply chain partners and vendors to ensure we comply with international standards as well as participate in initiatives that promote a more environmentally friendly approach to building consumer electronics.


These environmental initiatives include:
  • RoHS – Restriction of Hazardous Substances
  • WEEE – Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive
  • REACH – Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals
  • Halogen-free compliance for many of our products
  • CDP – Carbon Disclosure Project (more below)
Social & Environmental Responsibility

As part of our commitment to being a good corporate citizen, we have developed a social responsibility policy. A key initiative of our social and environmental compliance program is the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC). Since joining EICC in 2007, we have leveraged our membership as an opportunity to raise awareness among our critical suppliers.

The goal of EICC is to create transparency across the electronics industry supply chain as it relates to ethics, labor practices, health and safety and environmental compliance. EICC members are creating a standardized auditing and reporting tool so that companies throughout the chain are measured in a similar fashion.

To meet NVIDIA’s expectations, our suppliers are required to:

  • Comply with all national and local laws and regulations and require their vendors to do the same
  • Develop programs to comply and drive improvement based on the EICC Code of Conduct
  • Complete an annual Self-Assessment Questionnaire
  • Create a continuous improvement plan to close out open items with a defined timeline and metrics
  • Cooperate and participate in periodic onsite audits
  • Provide clear and accurate reporting to NVIDIA upon request
In 2008 NVIDIA has signed up to participate in three key EICC member Working Groups: Sustainability, Tools management and Learning and Capability.

NVIDIA Response to Conflict Metals Issue
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) holds vast resources of minerals, including gold tin, tantalum and tungsten. While all four of these minerals are used by many other industries and are also sourced from regions other than the DRC, NVIDIA considers it unacceptable that the sourcing of minerals eventually incorporated into our products could be contributing to ongoing conflicts and associated human rights abuses in these countries.

The subcontractors used to manufacture our products are many steps removed from the extraction, refining and trading of these materials. This limited visibility into the original mine extraction reduces the influence over the social and environmental practices in metal-extraction operations. Our ability to make improvements in these areas is most effective when we participate in industry wide initiatives through the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) Extractives working group. Currently, there is no reliable verification of “conflict-free minerals ’as there are several complex tiers that prevent traceability to the mine.

NVIDIA is committed to the EICC Extractives effort and has partnered with other companies to work toward a solution. We have implemented strategies to build awareness within our supply chain and they include:

  1. Sending letters to our suppliers requesting their assistance in helping us address this challenge
  2. Providing updates to suppliers on this issue during our Quarterly Business reviews
  3. Continuing to work on this issue with our industry peers in the EICC
Our purpose is not to employ bans or embargos but to help our suppliers better understand the situation in these regions and determine how it impacts our operations. We believe that through encouraging accountability and transparency we can develop a verification process suitable for our industry on this issue.

Product Quality Initiatives

The NVIDIA suppliers that we partner with to manufacture our products are certified to ISO 9001 and ISO14001. As global regulations on product chemical content changes, we are engaging with our supply chain through more training and engagement with our factory base. In order to remain proactive, NVIDIA monitors the chemical content of all of our products. We have robust product compliance and testing programs in which we partner with accredited laboratories and external consultants. We are a member of the Sony Green Partner Program.

Carbon Disclosure Project

We formalized and documented our commitment to the environment in 2006 and since then we have made progress in tracking our environmental footprint. We are committed to disclosing our Greenhouse Gas emissions through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and have completed CDP 5 and CDP 6 as well as participated in the CDP’s Supply Chain Leadership Project. Read NVIDIA’s statement on the CDP web site.