It's no secret that Dell aims to be the greenest technology company in the world. But on Earth Day last week, sites like The Consumerist, Gizmodo, and other blogs showed us that there's still more work for us to do.

Shortly after we read those posts, we had a team on the road to Dallas to meet with the vendor that shipped this flash drive to see how we can improve the process. End result, there's some easy fixes and some longer-term issues for us to address. Here's an outline:

• Immediate: Directive to use envelopes for small items such as these.
• Short term: Use of smaller boxes. We have requested an optimization analysis of product volume to box size.
• Short term: Implementation of Dell-defined volumetric metrics on void space in the package to be incorporated into our periodic vendor business reviews.

While third party items such as these make up a very small portion of our overall shipping volume, folks here know we need to fix it. Our sincere gratitude goes out to everyone who pointed this irregularity out to us. We hope that all of you will continue to provide feedback like this on any of our green-focused Direct2Dell posts, or if you have ideas about ways we can make improvements, please share them in the Environment section on IdeaStorm.

To do that:

1. Go to www.ideastorm.com
2. Login or Register
3. Click this button near the top right corner of the site (or click this button to the right) 
4. Enter your idea, then choose Environment from the category list, plus whatever other categories that apply.
   

We still have a lot of work to do, but with your help we can make Dell the greenest technology company in the world.

Stay tuned for more updates.