Dear planetEarth,

it's enough

You must really have had enough by now. No sooner have you grown a new tree than we’ve pretty much chopped down another two. We’re just using up too much, too much of everything. We squander vast quantities of wood, crude oil, ores, rare earth metals, sand, water, and any number of other raw materials to make our clothes, smartphones, food, automobiles, and houses – to name just a few examples. We consume resources almost twice as fast as you can grow them back*.

Then, in the end, we simply throw away so many things.

Some of the waste we burn, polluting the air, some of it we pile into huge stinking dumps, contaminating the earth and groundwater, and some of it floats around endlessly in the oceans, killing thousands of sea creatures and ending up as microplastics on our plates.

You’ve got a much smarter way of doing things.

Waste doesn’t exist for you. You recycle everything. What was once a tree decomposes into humus and feeds the growth of the next tree. That’s exactly how we’d like to do things. The experts among us call it the circular economy.

circular

economy

When turning old back into

new, the bottom of a drawer

is a good place to start.

When turning old back intonew, the bottom of a draweris a good place to start.

Our drawers at home are veritable treasure troves of raw materials. According to a study by the German Economic Institute, in Germany alone, everyone has an average of two or three unused cell phones gathering dust in a drawer. If all these devices were recycled, says the study, the raw materials they contain could be used to manufacture smartphones for the next ten years. Lots of us already hand in our old cell phones at the nearest Deutsche Telekom shop, for example. In fact, almost 3.5 million cell phones have already been recycled through Deutsche Telekom, helping to get valuable raw materials back into circulation.

What’s more, it’s not just cell phones that can be handed in at Deutsche Telekom shops, but plenty more devices that the company sells. On top of that, you can opt to rent a router from Deutsche Telekom instead of buying one. When it has reached the end of its usefulness, it will be refurbished to give it a whole new life.

There is a lot more treasure

lurking in our trash. For example,

certain things – such as food –

aren’t trash at all. Are you angry

that we throw away a third of

our food instead of eating it?

There is a lot more treasure lurking in our trash. For example, certain things – such as food – aren’t trash at all. Are you angry that we throw away a third of our food instead of eating it?

We have depleted fertile soils across the whole of Africa to grow that third of all our food that we throw out. Some of our food, such as bananas, is even flown half way around the world by plane, only for a third of it to be wasted. We know – it’s pretty stupid. That’s why some smart people have developed special apps and platforms, so food can be taken where it can be used before it ends up in the trashcan. That is how we are fighting world hunger and conserving important resources!

Sharing instead of buying. That’s how we’re saving lots of raw materials.

How often do we actually need a power drill? Over its entire lifetime, we will use it for an average of just 12 to 15 minutes in total. The rest of the time, it lies unused in its toolbox, along with plenty of other devices that rarely see the light of day. However, since we developed smart platforms such as nachbar.de, it’s no longer essential for everyone to have their own drill. We can just share them instead. We already do that with automobiles, bicycles, scooters, and plenty more things. If we can make ever greater use of sharing options, lots of us wouldn’t need our own drill, automobile, etc.

Clothing – we’ve been saving a lot of resources since the internet connected us all together in one huge flea market.

Every pair of pre-owned shoes we buy from online marketplaces such as Vinted saves a new pair from having to be made and spares a used pair from being consigned to the trashcan. That doesn’t just conserve resources, it also saves on all the energy that would otherwise be used to manufacture new products. Less CO₂ is emitted, also, and that’s good news for the environment.

Using less packaging and increasingly saying “goodbye” to plastic

A heap of packaging and not a lot inside. It’s time to put a stop to that. These days, machines can cut packages precisely to the absolute minimum dimensions. That means more boxes can be fitted into the truck, fewer journeys have to be made, less energy is used up, and fewer CO₂ emissions are generated. By using packaging machines such as these, Deutsche Telekom has cut the amount of cardboard it uses by 30 percent. Its packaging is also fully compostable, and of course free of plastic too.

What’s better than keeping waste

out of the trashcan? Exactly – just

don’t generate it in the first place.

What’s better than keeping wasteout of the trashcan? Exactly – justdon’t generate it in the first place.

Just think of the millions of trees that wouldn’t need to be felled if we sent emails over the internet instead of sending letters by mail. The result would be zero percent waste paper. But reducing trash volumes and saving trees are not the only benefits. It takes around 10 liters of drinking water to manufacture one sheet of paper. Every email we send instead of putting pen to paper also saves on this most valuable of resources for people and animals.

Alternatively, think of the billions of CDs, DVDs, and cassettes that we no longer need thanks to the internet and which therefore don’t end up in landfill or – worse still – in the oceans.

CDs, DVDs, and cassettes are all made of plastic – plastic that we avoid altogether today because we can stream our favorite music and movies over the internet. And if we’re using the Deutsche Telekom network, we’re looking out for the environment, too, since the network runs on green energy. That means we can sit back and enjoy Magenta TV with a clear conscience.

Although the internet consumes gigantic quantities of power, green energy still gives us an opportunity to take care of the environment.

Of course, we all know that the internet doesn’t just help conserve resources, but also uses up massive resources – specifically energy – and its consumption levels are growing all the time. However, there’s no need to feel guilty when surfing the net with Deutsche Telekom, as this particular network runs on 100 percent green energy. In other words, the electricity it uses comes entirely from renewables such as solar and wind power that don’t generate harmful CO₂. If we can also use green energy at home, then everything comes together nicely and we can become truly sustainable.