After a journey that has seen the company go from starting putting recycled plastics in its toner and ink cartridges to building some of its printers featuring those same plastics, HP is debuting its first notebook to feature post-consumer plastics. 

HP has introduced the Dragonfly, a thin-and-light notebook that is its first to include recycled plastics. To be fair, Dragonfly’s recycled plastic is not in an aesthetically important part, it’s in the speaker grills on the notebook. But it’s a start, said Corey McElroy, director of product management and marketing for premium commercial notebooks at HP. And that’s important.

“It’s a matter of getting started, getting focused, learning, and eventually scaling,” McElroy said. “These plastics do present cosmetic challenges, so you look at less cosmetically-important parts of the machine, and then we go from there.”

Going from there means getting the supply chain built for getting previously ocean-bound plastics and figuring out other opportunities to use them in devices like Dragonfly.

“We have a roadmap for this product line and more broadly, where we’ll find opportunities to bring in more components [that are recycled] into these devices,” McElroy said. “We just need to get the muscle built and go from there.”

Building that muscle will be important for the company — HP’s publicly set a goal of using recycled content for 30 percent of the plastics it uses across the company by 2025.

“When you’ve got the size and engineering heritage of HP, there’s nothing more motivating to a team than a challenge,” McElroy said.

Part of the Elite family, the Dragonfly is a 13.3-inch notebook in a 2.2-pound package. Despite its small size, the company says the Dragonfly boasts a battery life of just over 24 hours. And McElroy stressed the product “continues to be grounded in what makes it an EliteBook product,” including extensive testing, and the company’s layers of security and privacy technologies layered on, including its Sure Sense antimalware capabilities, and Sure Recover reimaging technology. And it continues the industry-wide trend towards “enterprise” computers that borrow heavily from the design trends that have become commonplace in the consumer space.

“We deal with, and we know our VARs do as well, this desire for a really good-looking product, something I would go and buy from a store shelf in retail. But I need to stand up to workplace needs — so it’s about a no-compromise experience,” McElroy said.

The HP Elite Dragonfly is slated to be available at distribution starting November 1, with a list retail price starting at $1,549 (U.S.).