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Status 2022

Make it

greener

Our forests, our air, our towns and cities, our children, our climate, and our planet. These are all good reasons to be greener in everything we do – and there are a million more. But how do we go about doing that?

Contents

Going all out for green
Surfing without worrying about the climate
Up and away to the cloud
Smart and green
Let the new Eco Rating guide you in purchasing a sustainable smartphone
Smartphones – what else we’re doing
Clearly labeled – #GreenMagenta
Blue Angel
It’s not just about what’s inside
Please don’t buy!
Greener shopping
The facilitator
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One way, certainly, is to rely on Magenta. With Magenta, you’re being green when you video-chat with friends, surf the internet, or simply make a phone call. The reason is that our network runs on green electricity –

Sometimes, you want more light, but you simply don’t feel like getting to your feet and walking over to the light switch. Now, thanks to the smart home, you can stay seated when that happens. Besides making a lot of things more practical, smart home technology also makes your home greener. How, you ask? For example, by controlling your heating system with smart thermostats, and thereby greatly increasing your winter heating efficiency. Just like that, you can achieve savings of up to

Did you stop using those plastic discs called “DVDs” ages ago? The climate is grateful. Now you can also do away with external hard disks. Make it greener! Organize your vacation photos and documents with ease in the Magenta Cloud. It’s always right there in your pocket and, as long as you charge your cellphone with green energy, it’s as light as your new green footprint –

Being greener in everything you do can be be easy. Our plan for a sustainable future involves developing smart technologies and sustainable products that make saving CO₂ so easy that you don’t even notice you’re doing it. That’s why we’re ...

going

all out

for

green

Watch video

going

Tim Höttges, CEO of Deutsche Telekom, explains why we’re going all out for green.

Surfing without worrying about the climate

While reading this text online on your computer or smartphone, you are consuming energy. After all, your computer is connected to a power supply and your smartphone needs to be charged. That is not all, though; the network infra­structure in the background – the networks, radio masts, and huge data centers – also consumes energy. Does that mean surfing the web is bad for the climate? We want you to be able to surf without worrying about your impact on the climate. That’s why we obtain 100 percent of the power used to operate our entire network infra­structure from renewable sources. These sources (wind power, hydroelectric power and solar energy) are helping to slow climate change, as they do not emit any environ­mentally harmful greenhouse gases when used to generate electricity. From mobile and fixed networks to the internet and MagentaTV, our customers throughout the Group benefit from our green Deutsche Telekom network.

Up and away to the cloud

Paperwork is a real nuisance, isn’t it? The environment suffers, too, because paper manufacturing consumes resources such as wood, water, and above all energy. Thanks to emails, online banking, paperless invoices, and the like, we are thankfully having to deal with less and less actual paperwork.

Digital data also needs to be stored somewhere, though. The Deutsche Telekom Cloud is a particularly energy-efficient solution for storing data, and our Cloud offerings help customers to be much more economical than they would be if they were to run all their applications on computers at home. Together, better servers, data centers that are more energy efficient, and higher capacity utilization in our infrastructure help to drive down energy consumption and can also help shrink our customers’ carbon footprint.

Smart and green

Given how quickly technology is developing, many people get a new smartphone every year, and think that’s only normal. But is that sustainable? And what happens to all those used phones? Usually, they wind up in some drawer. Sometimes, they simply get thrown away. We want to make smartphone use more sustainable for our customers, and we’re working closely with manufacturers toward that end.

smartphone and leave

Smartphones and sustainability – a contradiction in terms?

Manufacturing of electronic devices such as smart­phones entails environ­mental and social challenges. For one thing, smartphone production consumes large amounts of water and energy. In fact, the manu­facturing process accounts for a large part of a smart­phone’s lifetime carbon footprint. What’s more, some 30 metals go into smart­phones, including valuable metals such as gold, copper, coltan, and cobalt. Mining the ores that some metals are extracted from is bad for the environment. In addition to this, many raw materials cannot yet be recycled and put back into circulation. Furthermore, working conditions at companies that mine rare raw materials or make smart­phones often fail to comply with labor law standards. Other issues: Many devices are difficult to repair, and excessive quantities of material go into their packaging. Deutsche Telekom does not manu­facture smart­phones itself. With a view to offering our customers increasingly sustainable products, we are working closely with our suppliers and seeking to address challenges holistically – including challenges such as human rights, working conditions in the supply chain, the raw materials that products require, climate issues related to products, the recyclability and reparability of devices, and packaging.

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2 tons of gold in our drawers

There around 100 million old mobile phones in Germany's drawers; only 3% of Germans recycle their devices. And yet, a drawer is the worst possible place for them, because they contain precious raw material that we need urgently.

Back casing

The back casing of the phone consists of particularly robust plastics.

Battery

Besides graphite, plastics and silicon, the battery also contains various lithium compounds as well as stannic oxide, nickel, manganese, cobalt and further raw materials.

Battery casing

The casing itself is made from plastics, the battery contacts and the charging plug that is also found here consist of precious metal alloys.

Connectors

Inside the plastic connectors there are electrical contcats containing precious metals like gold, silver and platine.

Circuit board

The circuit board contains precious silver, zinc, gold, platine, lead and tin, as well as copper, glass and ceramics, but also plastic materials like PPS, epoxy resin and ABS-PC.

Contact plate

The plate is mostly made from plastics; it has metal contacts on the backside that close a circuit on the board when a key is pressed.

Insulating plate

This plate consists of plastics and shields the electronic parts behind it.

Screws

The screws are made from iron and often have an additional zinc coating.

Speaker

Aside from the formative plastics, the speaker also contains copper. Additionally, there is a permanent magnet made from ferrite or an alloy of aluminium, nickel and cobalt.

Display

The phone's display is made from plastics and a plethora of precious metals.

Keyboard

The keyboard is made out of plastics.

Front cover

The front cover consists of particularly robust plastics.

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Let the new Eco Rating guide you in purchasing a sustainable smartphone

Do you need a new smartphone? And do you want your new phone to be maximally sustainable? The Eco Rating scheme for smartphones, which we introduced in 2021, in collaboration with Orange, Telefónica, Telia Company, and Vodafone, has been adopted by a total of nine network operators to date. The Eco Rating facilitates comparisons by providing details on five key aspects: durability, reparability, recyclability, climate compatibility, and resource-efficiency.

And here’s how it works:

Phone manufacturers provide information about their phones. That information is then used to prepare complete life cycle assessments of their phones. The assessments, which take account of 13 different environmental indicators and six material-efficiency criteria, yield combined point totals for the phones. The maximum achievable score is 100 points. The higher the score, the more sustainable the device is. The purpose of the Eco Rating scheme isn’t only to enable consumers to make more informed choices, however. It is also to encourage manufacturers to make their devices greener.

Smartphones – what else we’re doing

1Devices

In Germany and Austria, we are stepping up our collaboration with Fairphone – the leading manufacturer of sustainable smartphones.

2Packaging

Some smartphone manufacturers ship their devices in plastic-free packaging. And they use cartons that consist most of recycled paper. We are working with such manufacturers to develop ways of making the packaging for their devices even more sustainable. In 2022, nearly 90 percent of the third-party smartphones we sold in Europe already came in sustainable packaging. By the end of 2024, we aim to raise that figure to over 90 percent with no deductions whatsoever.

3eSIMs

We have been offering eSIMs (digital SIMs) in Germany since 2017. Use of eSIMs instead of conventional SIM cards saves resources, including the resources used to manufacture the cards and their packaging and the resources consumed in delivering the cards. Other Deutsche Telekom national companies in Europe, such as Makedonski Telekom, also offer eSIMs.

4Back into circulation

We have been taking back all old mobile devices for many years now, ensuring the continued use of functional devices and professional recycling of the remaining ones. In Germany and the USA alone, we have already taken back more than 11.8 million used devices. In 2022, we launched the “Good Cause Initiative” in Europe. For every device that our customers and employees return, we donate money to a good cause.

Speedport Smart 4

#GreenMagenta – do you want to make your online activity – including internet use on mobile devices and on computers at home – more sustainable? Then look for our #GreenMagenta label.

Router
GreenMagenta-Label

Speedport Smart 4

Our Speedport Smart 4 router is just one of the products to carry this label. Sustainability was factored in from the very start of development of the router. A total of 90 percent – currently the highest proportion possible – of the housing is made of recycled plastic. That saves a great deal of CO₂, because 90 percent less energy is required to produce recycled plastic than to manufacture new plastics. The technology itself is greener, too. For example, LAN connections that used to contain lead have been replaced with a lead-free equivalent. The packaging contains no plastic either and can be disposed of with your paper waste. An overview of all products to date that carry the #GreenMagenta label is available here.

Read article "Digital civil courage" #GreenMagenta

In addition to #GreenMagenta, we also have a #GoodMagenta label for projects, measures, and initiatives that make a positive contribution to social challenges in the digital world. The clear rules we have established for awarding our #GreenMagenta and #GoodMagenta labels are set out here.

It’s not just about what’s inside …

… the external package is also important. Has it ever made you cross just how much packaging waste even small products generate? In addition to filling up our trash cans, waste has to be properly separated, by materials categories such as plastic, metals, and paper, and that is a time-consuming process. Above all, though, the growing volumes of packaging waste are a real environmental problem. Even manufacturing processes use a great deal of resources. Production of one metric ton of paper, for example, uses up to 50 000 liters of water and 10 000 kWh of power, and it releases one metric ton of CO₂. For this reason, we are working to use more-sustainable, more-efficient packaging:

Since mid-2022, all new Deutsche-Telekom-branded products being placed on the European market come in sustainable packaging.
We are working to persuade all major smart­phone manu­facturers to switch to more sustainable packaging. As of the end of 2022, nearly 90 percent of the smart­phones we sell in Europe have sustainable packaging.
Shipping boxes for technical equipment and spare parts that are dispatched via our technology department in Germany are cut precisely to size, to minimize the amount of material used, and the cuttings are recycled as environ­mentally friendly filling material.

Please don’t buy!

Do you own a power drill? If so, how often do you use it? Probably not very often if you’re not exactly a big DIY fan. Experts have calculated that we use a a power drill for an average of just 13 minutes before throwing it away. It’s a similar story with other everyday items. That makes consumption a one-way street.

But alternative strategies are available. Strategies such as “renting instead of buying” and “sharing instead of buying,” which have become a whole lot easier in the internet age. From cars to gardening tools and electronics, there are now a whole host of rental and sharing apps that enable people to rent products for a short period or borrow them from someone living nearby.

You don’t need to buy your router or media receiver from Deutsche Telekom either, as we also offer rental models. Returned devices that still work are refurbished and rented out again. In this way, we reduce electronic waste and also avoid the environmental impact associated with producing new devices.

Greener shopping

With live plant walls, recyclable LED lights, energy-saving screens, and eco­logi­cal floor coverings, our shops are also gradually becoming more sustainable.

It obviously wouldn’t be very sustainable simply to replace fully functional instal­lations everywhere, so our Green Shops concept in Germany has been implemented gradually since 2018, in all new shops and in shops that need to be renovated. Inter­nationally, too, the Deutsche Telekom shopping experience is becoming ever greener. We are imple­menting our concept in more than 100 inter­national locations, including both new and renovated locations.

We don’t want our company to be alone in going all out for green. We are also keen to help our individual consumers and business customers live and do business more sustainably. Digitalization is making this easier.

One very simple example is how working from home and using video conferences is eliminating numerous commutes and business trips, and thereby supporting climate protection. We regularly calculate the impact of all our solutions on protecting the climate. In 2022, this revealed that Deutsche Telekom solutions enabled our customers in Germany alone to save 3.76 times more CO₂ than the company actually generated. We call this the “enablement factor”.

Here are a number of other examples of how we make it possible for our customers to be more sustainable:

1Smart home

Heating that turns off automati­cally when a window is opened? Lights that only stay on when there’s someone in the room? Our smart home solutions help reduce energy consump­tion in the home. Find out more

2Smart cities

Smart city solutions make urban life more sustainable by reducing energy consumption, light and noise pollution, and carbon emis­sions. At the Birkenfeld Environ­mental Campus (Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld) of the Trier University of Applied Sciences, for example, a “Model Street” shows how smart street lighting can combine strategic sustaina­bility policy with smart climate protection and regional value creation. Find out more

3Smart farming

Who would have thought that the internet could also help farmers work more sustain­ably? Connected farm machines are just one example of this. Exact position data can be trans­mitted directly to the steering system in real time. This enables machines to be precisely guided in their lanes. That reduces fuel consumption and prevents unneces­sary trips when sowing, fertilizing, and harvesting. Find out more

4Smart health

Our telehealth platform enables better medical care. Patients, physicians, hospitals, nursing staff, pharmacies, and health insurers can share findings or lab results in encrypted form, for instance. Find out more

5Smart logistics

Fuel efficiency is good for the climate – and for our pocketbooks. And apps that analyze our driving habits can help increase fuel efficiency. The Low Carbon Mobility Manage­ment (LCMM) service, for example, uses standardized algorithms to measure the performance of car and truck drivers. Use of the service can reduce fuel use and green­house emissions by 8 to 15 percent. Find out more

6Cloud computing

Customers can reduce their energy require­ments by up to 80 percent by using our cloud services and migrating their existing infra­structures to our efficient data centers. Find out more

7Promoting digitalization

Digitalization helps companies become more resilient, and better able to address market requirements in forward-looking ways. We are working to move the digital trans­formation forward, and we support companies of all sizes and from all industries, and munici­pali­ties and schools – for example, with free, individual consultations – in finding and applying for the right funding for their digitali­zation projects in Germany. Find out more

We need your input

Do you have an idea or suggestion for Deutsche Telekom? Then we’d like to hear from you! In Germany, you can take part in surveys, polls, and discussions in our Ideenschmiede (think tank) or place suggestions in our digital ideas box. In addition to this, our workshops (attended in person or virtually) give you the opportunity to discuss exciting topics with the community and Deutsche Telekom representatives. Simply register and join in!
To obtain unfiltered, genuine feedback about the latest products and developments, we also regularly invite customers to the Customer Café. It’s a bit like speed dating – five visitors to the café each take 15 minutes to help our product owners gear our products to the needs of customers.

Home, smart Home

In 2022, our customers in Germany saved 3.76 times as much CO₂, by using Deutsche Telekom solutions, as the Deutsche Telekom company itself produced.