We're doing our bit

We're mindful in Telefónica O2 UK that simple initiatives snowball into bigger effects. We've been implementing a series of changes to our daily business to try to improve our environmental performance.

Under the control of our ISO14401 environmental management system (EMS), which has been in place since 1999, we have been addressing all aspects of our performance, including our fuel, energy & water usage, our waste management, our general emissions & transport and our Approach to procurement.

We started with the simple things; we made a lot of savings in the early days without spending a large amount of money. The secret has been to take a no-nonsense, common sense approach. For example, changing heating and cooling patterns in the offices and call centres. These are the best savings as they really affect the bottom line. Other simple initiatives have included:

• In 2007, we launched our, 'Flick the Switch' campaign to raise awareness of good housekeeping initiatives. It targeted awareness in two key areas; Lighting, and PCs & monitors, and encouraged staff to switch off these items when not needed. Lighting contributes to over 15 percent of our office energy costs, and turning off PCs & monitors at night could save over 1,318 tonnes of CO2 and £200,000 can be saved each year in call centres alone.
• In early 2008, O2 revised the default settings across almost 9000 PC's across the company to reduce the monitor standby time from 20minutes to 10minutes. This saved 313 tonne of CO2, not to mention about £70k per year.
• We also undertook initiatives to optimise the use of air conditioning; to review lighting fittings, their run times & controls; to establish exact power requirements of sites and removing surplus equipment; to work with key suppliers to provide higher efficiency equipment and to investigate potential renewable energy options across all aspects of O2 UK.

With these easy wins under our belt, Telefónica O2 UK have now embarked on more ambitious plans; since 2006 we have invested £1.4 million in smart meters. This is allowing us to more accurately monitor our real-time energy consumption, & thereby implement significant efficiency programmes, across our cell sites, our retail premises and our offices.

We also looking further at alternative energy options; everything from micro wind-turbines and solar power to LPG generators and ambient air free-cooling fan boxes at our cell sites.

These initiatives are bringing results; our overall business has improved its energy efficiency by 15 percent in the last 3 years, and avoided a massive 47k tonnes of CO2. Early in 2009, Telefónica O2 UK became the first UK telecoms operator to be awarded the Carbon Standard, in recognition of our year-on-year reductions in our carbon footprint.

What you can do

We're all very attached to our mobiles, laptops and broadband routers. And that's a good thing! Using this technology instead of travelling, instead of consuming paper and instead of acquiring hardcopy CD & DVDs etc, can really be helpful when it comes to tackling environmental issues like climate change and energy wastage.

But, we can still do little things to reduce the impact of technology.

Unplug your chargers

We've all heard this, but how many of us actually do it? Many phone chargers, and especially older models use electricity even when they're not connected to a mobile phone. So it's always better to unplug your charger when your battery's full.

In 2008, Telefónica O2 UK became the first UK network to launch a universal charger, which works across over 95 percent of our product range, and has built-in technology that ensures the unit powers down to a bare minimum, when your handset battery is fully charged.

Delay upgrading your handset

We know it sounds drastic, but think about it. Last year roughly 1 billion new handsets were sold across the world, each of them containing between 500 and 1,000 different components. Not only that, a huge amount of energy gets used up during the extraction of resources, the production and the transport of new phones.

Recycle your unwanted handsets

What seems a little battered and old to you might actually seem cutting-edge to someone else in a different part of the world. The good thing about old mobile phones is that they can mostly be repaired and sent abroad to be cared for by new owners in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, where the cost of a new phone is expensive, and landlines are not always available.

If your old phone can't be re-used then you can pass it to us and we'll make sure it's recycled and that all its components will be taken out to begin a new life again as something else.

There are two ways in which you can recycle your phone with O2:

1. Hand in an unwanted phone at any O2 retail store. And for every phone we recycle, we give £5 to the O2 Energy Saver Fund.
2. Go to our O2 Recycle website and get up to £200 cash in return for sending us your old mobile phone. We also pay cash for unwanted MP3 Players, Digital Cameras and Sat Navs.