How telcos can help consumers live more sustainably without compromising their business objectives.

Telcos can support consumer sustainability efforts

Coordinated by the GSMA, telcos around the world have signed up to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and many have established their own net-zero-related targets.

STL follows the progress of over 70 tech companies, including more than 50 telcos, in a dedicated Sustainability Scorecard. While we believe that telcos genuinely work hard towards their net-zero goals, it is clear that more can be done. However, some potentially important measures are not well aligned with telcos’ financial goals.

The alignment between the handset upgrade cycle and sustainability goals

Source: STL Partners

One of the biggest disconnects is between the telecoms industry encouraging consumers to buy more devices and the broader societal need to buy less of everything, including consumer electronics. Ultimately, as consumers, we need to use what we own for longer, and then find a way to reuse it or recycle it, and only buy new goods when we must. But this means a significant change in behaviour and telcos have the power to nudge consumers in either direction.

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As some telcos and their partners seek to persuade people to buy more handsets, routers, TVs, smart watches, tablets, headsets and smart speakers, they could be perceived to be holding back progress towards the following two SDGs:

• Target 12.2: By 2030, achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources.
• Target 12.5: By 2030, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, recycling and reuse.

What is more, smartphones are getting bigger, so producing them requires more natural resources. As Orange notes, 80% of the environmental impact of a smartphone is linked to its manufacturing and end-of-life phases.

This report outlines the measures telcos can take to help lower consumers’ environmental footprints (as shown below), with a particular focus on greenhouse gas emissions. It considers the steps telcos could take to extend the lifespan of devices, reduce the amount of digital hardware being deployed in households and lower the energy intensity of connectivity. In each case, it weighs the likely impact on environmental goals with the potential impact on business objectives.

The second half of the report considers other measures telcos could take to help consumers to cut their greenhouse gas emissions more broadly, such as promoting the usage of renewable energy and reducing the carbon footprint of transportation.

Table of Contents

• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• The regulatory spotlight
• Encouraging consumers to use their devices for longer
• Lowering the number of devices per household
• Reducing the energy consumed with connectivity
• Helping consumers cut their carbon footprints
• Conclusions
• Index

Related research

• How to embed sustainability across a telco
• Should telcos dive deeper into energy?
• The sustainability scorecard
• Roadmap to creating and executing winning Scope 3 strategies

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David Pringle

David Pringle

Senior Associate Analyst

David Pringle is a Senior Associate Analyst at STL Partners, specialising within our Consumer Services research stream. He spent five years as the European tech and telecoms correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and provides editorial and analytical services to a range of organisations in the tech, media and telecoms industries, as well moderating panel discussions at industry conferences, webinars and on Mobile World Live TV. David has a BA in English and Politics from York University.