Striving for Sustainability: Meet Tom

This blog is part of our focus on Cisco employees who are "Striving for Sustainability" by finding opportunities to integrate sustainability in their day-to-day work.

At Cisco, we are designing our products and packaging with circularity in mind, aligning them to our Circular Design Principles. Circular design means designing products and systems that enable reuse, minimize environmental impacts, drive innovation, and realize value for our stakeholders.

That's where Tom Jackson comes in. Tom is the Senior Director of Supply Chain, Computing Systems, & Product Packaging, and Executive Sponsor of Circular Design at Cisco. His passion for sustainability is rooted in a lifelong love of the outdoors and shaped by visits to nearly 45 U.S. national parks. Learn more about how this has led to a career in advancing circular design:

How have your previous roles influenced your interest and involvement in circular design?

Tom: I think my previous roles really prepared me for this by giving me an outsider's perspective. I've had around eleven different careers here at Cisco over my 25 years. I started early on in test development engineering, then moved into broadband cable routing, fixed microwave wireless systems, and later worked as a program manager. So I've had experience across a huge variety of businesses and operating models.

I brought deep experience in taking products from ideation to mass production, which proved valuable in sustainability because I understood how things get done at Cisco. Our sustainability experts taught me the principles and priorities, and my role was to systematically embed circular design into Cisco's product development process, using my network to build the initial team and launch circular design. Changing 30 years of "how we've always done it" was no small feat, but we made progress - and this work will never truly end, as we'll always be looking for what's next.

Why is circular design important at Cisco?

Tom: What's different about Cisco's approach to circular design is that we've built a complete system. We have a process, guiding principles, training, a scoring methodology - and, most importantly, full buy-in from the design, new product introduction (NPI), and supply chain communities. It's truly embedded into our business and is now just part of how we release every product.

This isn't something we want to keep to ourselves. We're all on the same planet, and progress on circularity only matters if everyone moves forward together. That's why we're transparent about our approach, openly sharing details about where we're headed next.

To me personally, I think we all have that intrinsic drive - when we see the misuse of materials, or products not being made with recycled or recyclable materials. I love the movie Wall-E, and I don't want my kids or grandkids to end up living on Wall-E's trash planet. But honestly, that's the direction the world was heading with its old linear cycle of "design, make, dispose."

There were also some real "aha" moments. For example, we were doing a Cisco building refresh, which included updating the networking equipment in one of the labs. The amount of packaging waste that came from installing hundreds of Cisco products in a single day was eye-opening. That was a real catalyst for me - thinking about the thousands of customers who experience this as well.

Another big catalyst has been the way the market and our customer base are evolving. Brand value is often tied to sustainability now - being seen as a circular company really matters. When we're responding to a request for quotation (RFQ) and can show we're more sustainable than our competitors, that can be a real differentiator. In places like Europe, it's becoming table stakes for customers and a focus of policymakers to emphasize recycled IT products and recycled material origins. So, it's just good business, in my opinion.

How have engineers at Cisco responded to this type of initiative?

Tom: We've really altered our DNA - we're different now in how we design things. When we first started this journey, there was a massive amount of reluctance and skepticism.

Training was key to overcoming that reluctance. We didn't want it to be just another mandatory training. We knew it had to be interactive and engaging, something that would really draw people in and help them understand the principles. I loved choose-your-own-adventure books as a kid, so we modeled the training after them. Your choices reveal downstream effects, helping designers see how their decisions - like including every possible accessory - can create waste.

Then we introduced a scoring methodology, so every new product and packaging at Cisco could be scored against these principles. A product needs at least 75 points to be released. That really gamified the process. Our engineers and designers are competitive people, so it sparked this energy. We even added an innovation section where you could earn bonus points for coming up with new circular design ideas.

The design community's creativity has been extraordinary - from making accessories opt-in to reduce waste, to eliminating paint and single-use plastic, using recycled materials, and rethinking packaging. We've seen big strides in power management, modularity, and product longevity. Once Cisco's design engineers and architects understood the principles and what was at stake, they took off, delivering innovative ideas that exceeded our expectations. All credit goes to them - they've truly made it happen.

What is the most rewarding aspect about working in circular design?

Tom: Besides the amazing work from Cisco's people, it's about seeing the tangible outcomes. It's one thing to score your products and have the data, but it's another to look at the downstream impact these efforts are having. We continue to work on reducing plastics in our products. We used to include foam with many products' packaging, but we've made good progress on our goal to reduce foam in product packaging by 75% (by weight) by FY25. We've also seen a 90%+ reduction in single-use plastic bags on accessories as well as changed default accessory options based on customer feedback, eliminating a ton of unnecessary waste.

There are real bottom-line benefits, too. Eliminating waste, unnecessary accessories, and cosmetic features has saved costs while improving sustainability. For example, eliminating oil-based wet paint from products not only reduced volatile organic compounds (VOCs) but also cut out extra logistics, labor, and waste. Most of our products live in racks in data centers - no one sees them - so there's no need for unnecessary paint or decorative features.

Overall, it's been an evolution. Five years ago, a lot of these goals felt daunting. We didn't know how we'd move away from certain packaging, but with trial and error, we figured it out. And we're seeing the industry follow. When we started, we had to create our own recycled plastic supply, but now there are plenty of vendors. Now the industry is moving in this direction and we're proud to be leading the charge.

Read more about Cisco's Circular Transformation on our Purpose Reporting Hub.