Minimizing product impacts

Some of the substances used in our products can be harmful if they are not managed properly, as can the disposal of products at the end of their lives.

Our product development processes integrate Design for Environment principles to minimize impacts throughout the lifecycle, including at the end of their life.

Energy-efficient technology
Products’ energy consumption during use is a priority because the use phase is responsible for at least three-quarters of total lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions. For a typical urban site in Europe, a lifecycle assessment found that the use phase accounts for 84 percent of global warming potential.

Our award-winning Flexi base station leads the market in energy efficiency. We continue to introduce enhancements that achieve further savings, including low-power servers and controllers and software to provide more capacity with less power.

Energy solutions
Our Energy Solutions portfolio brings together products, services and software to reduce network power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by using more efficient technology and renewable energy.

These are competitive factors because they help operators meet three objectives:

• Expanding into areas with no grid or an unreliable grid supply
• Reducing operating costs
• Cutting greenhouse gas emissions to meet climate change targets.

Renewable energy is particularly important because an estimated 75,000 off-grid sites will be built each year in developing countries over the next few years. These sites have traditionally been powered by diesel generators but they are often in remote areas that are difficult to reach. This makes it hard to provide regular diesel supplies for the generators and diesel is also often lost due to theft. Renewable energy is an attractive alternative.

We also offer a Green IT consulting service to support customers’ energy efficiency programs. The service uses the expertise we have built up managing energy in our own information technology services.