When Participation Becomes Infrastructure
Since 2018, Acer and RedPeak have built sustainable systems from employee action outward.
Corporate sustainability typically flows top-down through mandates and metrics. Acer’s approach inverts that logic: It began with employees designing local interventions, then systematically expanded that participatory model into supply chains, consumer tools, and R&D.
Since 2018, this progression has created measurable scale — 73,000 volunteer hours and 70,000 people impacted in 2024 alone. But the more instructive element is structural: bottom-up participation creates the legitimacy and learning required for each subsequent expansion.
Stage 1: Employee-Driven Culture
Launched in 2018, Project Humanity has given 7,500 employees, 85% of Acer’s global workforce, agency to design sustainability interventions within their contexts. Los Angeles teams built technology centers for disadvantaged children. Ukrainian offices delivered bicycle desks that generate electricity to schools and hospitals during power outages. Thai partners upgraded vocational classrooms in rural provinces. Italian teams sponsored the country’s first all-female esports roster.
These initiatives are interpretations of a founding principle — breaking barriers between people and technology — applied through local knowledge. The diversity of solutions demonstrates that sustainability can flex across geographies and priorities while maintaining coherent direction.
This cultural foundation has produced two critical assets: proof that employee-led initiatives can generate measurable impact, and a workforce engaged in translating abstract values into concrete action. For 2025, Acer has targeted 90% staff participation.
Stage 2: Supply Chain Collaboration
Beginning in 2020, Earthion has extended the collaborative model to 62 supply chain partners across 20 organizations. The framework operates through six coordinated pillars: sustainable design, production efficiency, packaging transformation, low-carbon logistics, renewable energy adoption, and recycling.
Specific moves include mandating post-consumer recycled plastics in product design, shifting to 100% recyclable pulp packaging, requiring biofuel adoption and emission disclosure in logistics, and scaling global electronics trade-in programs. Rather than isolated vendor requirements, these represent coordinated foundational changes that function when partners treat sustainability as shared responsibility, not obligation.
The progression has been deliberate: Acer’s internal culture provides the template and credibility to ask external partners to adopt similar participation structures.
Stage 3: Consumer Behavior
The Earth Mission App is translating institutional practice into consumer-facing design. Since its launch in 2021, 16,500 users have completed 1.8 million sustainable actions — one every 30 seconds — funding 8,000 trees across continents from the Philippines to Denmark.
The app reduces friction so that sustainability becomes habitual through design instead of aspiration or guilt. It also generates behavioral data that informs product development and validates demand for sustainable features.
Stage 4: Innovation
The Acer Climate Lab operates as an experimental space where circular economy principles meet product R&D. Developed with IDEO and Sid Lee, the lab’s “Conscious Technology” framework addresses four domains: work systems with eco-friendly lifecycle management, educational tools that help schools measure carbon reduction, transportation systems for EV charging and micromobility, and intelligent home solutions for healthier living environments.
Unveiled at 2023’s COP28, this stage embeds environmental responsibility directly into core business development, not as separate corporate citizenship work.
From Proof to System
What one stage proves, the next inherits: Employee-led work creates operational credibility that makes supply chain partners willing to coordinate at scale. That coordination validates consumer-facing tools as backed by institutional capacity, not marketing. Consumer behavior — 1.8 million recorded actions — gives Acer’s Climate Lab demand signals to inform its design, embedding sustainability into product development from the start.
When 7,500 employees see their local actions amplified into supply chain requirements and consumer products, sustainability shifts from aspiration to operation.
BY THE NUMBERS
- ~72 regions where Project Humanity operates globally
- 62 members in Earthion supply chain collaboration across 3 generations, 4 departments
- 160+ Acer operating sites worldwide
- 7,500 employees engaged in Project Humanity
- 8,000 trees planted from the Philippines to Denmark via the app
- 70,000+ people directly impacted by Project Humanity in 2024
- 72,966 volunteer hours invested through Project Humanity in 2024
- 1.8 million sustainable actions completed via Earth Mission App since 2021
- 1 sustainable action every 30 seconds via the Earth Mission App