An environmental perspective

Sustainabilityand the corporate mobile

Executive summary 3

Why be a sustainable company? 4

Sustainability and the work-provided smartphone 5

The danger lurking in your phone 6

A significant environmental impact 7

Why use two when one will do? 9

The environmental benefits of adopting 10 smartnumbers mobile

In conclusion 11

smartnumbers mobile & The Carbon Trust 12

How to get in touch 12

Contents

Executive summarySustainability is rising up the agenda as public and private sector organisations recognise the need for a clean environmental record as part of wider moves to improve brand perception. As the trend towards more sustainable work-practices increases, so does the need to look beyond obvious ‘green’ policies such as recycling paper, managing emissions or putting out an annual environmental impact report.

One area that has thus far received little attention is mobile telecommunications, and in particular the environmental impact of having a separate mobile phone for work and private use. With an estimated 14m people in the UK alone carrying more than one phone, and the environmental impact of the manufacture, use and disposal of these, organisations should look seriously at their current mobile policy.

Until now, organisations have had little choice other than giving out a second phone for staff to use for work. However, with the advent of smartnumbers mobile, this has now changed. smartnumbers mobile enables, for the first time, a true dual-persona capability for any smartphone, giving organisations the ability to provide staff with a second mobile number and not a second mobile handset. With smartnumbers mobile, all of the benefits of having two separate handsets are retained – but at much lower cost to the organisation and to the environment.

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This e-book shows that the dual-persona capability provided by smartnumbers mobile opens the door for new environmental policies directed at cutting device consumption and waste, making good on the promises of a sustainable organisation, and providing increased brand differentiation.

Why be a sustainable company?

“Some pursue sustainability out of pragmatism, some out of idealism. But regardless of their motivation, they have consistently generated

above-average growth rates and profit margins”The Harvard Business Review - March 2013

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The benefits of sustainable organisational practices have been widely reported and include:

Meeting targets and complying with legislation relating to issues such as carbon emissions reduction and waste recycling.

Improving the corporate image and boosting brand equity through the portrayal of your organisation as socially responsible.

Increasing employee motivation and retention, linked to perceptions of high corporate social responsibility.

Reducing costs by cutting energy and materials consumption, and improving efficiency.

Increasing profits by helping to justify premium pricing and extending brand loyalty.

Gaining competitive advantage through positive brand association.

Sustainability and the work-provided smartphoneWhen it comes to sustainability, few would consider smartphones to be a big deal. While that is undoubtedly true compared to big-ticket pollution items such as air travel or heavy industry, their abundance makes the smartphone quite an issue with respect to corporate social responsibility. The environmental impact of a single smartphone is more significant than most people realise. Friends of the Earth research has found that 13 tons of water and 18 square metres of land are required to make a single smartphone. If you multiply this by the 88 million mobile phone subscriptions in the UK, then it’s clear that the manufacture of these phones will have had a significant environmental impact.

But rather than addressing the problem, most organisations are making it worse by giving staff a second mobile phone to use for work when they already have a perfectly good phone of their own.

Some published sources suggest that mobile phones get upgraded every 18 months on average. Thus, for organisations that provide staff with a second, separate mobile phone for work, their ongoing environmental footprint will continue to increase.

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Today around 30% of the adult population, an estimated 14.2m people, carry separate personal and work phones. Not only is this expensive for the organisation, but it’s inconvenient for the staff who have to carry, manage and charge two devices, and it’s environmentally irresponsible.

Almost all electronic devices rely to a greater or lesser extent on materials that are toxic to the environment. Smartphones are no exception, even though manufacturers have been reducing the level of toxic chemicals in their products over the years. It is not possible to completely eliminate hazardous material such as bromine, mercury and lead from these devices.

That’s not all. Modern smartphones contain a wide variety of rare earth metals, such as neodymium, praseodymium, terbium, dysprosium, europium, yttrium and lanthanum.

These materials do not represent much of a hazard while the phones are in use. However, the way they are extracted from nature, and what happens to them when phones are thrown away, is a cause for significant concern.

The danger lurking in your phone

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A significant environmental impactThe environmental impact of smartphones increases greatly when you consider the lifetime costs of the device.

To extract the metals in the first place, raw ores are mined with heavy machinery. Mining operations cause significant damage to the environment. To source just the tiny amount of gold needed for a smartphone circuit board, for example, around 220 pounds of mining waste are produced.

This process is also very emissions intensive; the production of a single kilo of gold requires 380,000 mega-joules of energy, compared to 100 mega-joules for a kilo of plastic.

Rare earth metals, meanwhile, have to be separated from radioactive thorium and uranium using sulphuric acid in an energy and water intensive extraction process.

The radioactive waste produced during extraction has to be stored safely, which is not always the case in the countries where mining takes place. Rare earth extraction activities have been linked to cancer deaths in regions such as Mongolia, and Friends of the Earth have publicised significant environmental damage to Indonesian islands in the production of tin specifically for mobile phones.

Once the raw materials have been obtained, mobile phones go through a manufacturing process that creates around 16 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per device.

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Indeed, according to Ethical Consumer, ‘the bulk of the carbon footprint associated with many electronic devices is buried in the manufacturing chain, where the electronic devices are assembled. More carbon is used in the manufacture of smartphones than consumers ever use after buying them.’ According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency, the energy consumption of the 14.2m ‘second phones’ in the UK would power nearly 30,000 homes for a year.

There is an additional footprint for the packaging and for transporting the products from the factory to the retailer. And when you start using it, your smartphone will consume power equivalent to another three kilos of carbon dioxide a year.

All in all, the average smartphone is estimated to create around 94 kilos of carbon dioxide equivalent over its lifetime.

Finally, there is the issue of disposal. According to Greenpeace, ‘every year, hundreds of thousands of old computers and mobile phones are dumped in landfills or burned in smelters. Thousands more are exported, often illegally, from Europe, the US, Japan and other industrialised countries, to Asia. There, workers at scrap yards, some of whom are children, are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and poisons.’

In fairness, the mobile industry is working hard to clean up its act. In 2006, for example, all mobile phones contained polyvinyl chloride and brominated flame retardants, which can release dangerous dioxins when burnt. By 2014, half the phones were free of them.

Similarly, the mobile industry achieved a threefold increase in efficiency for third-generation base stations amplifiers between 2001 and 2007, and the sector continues to strive for more efficient operations.

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Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 9

Why use two when one will do?

Given the environmental impacts outlined above, it clearly does not make economic or environmental sense for organisations to provide staff with a second mobile phone. Indeed, many organisations are already arriving at this conclusion because of costs, security and the fact that staff do not want to carry two phones.

The usual answer is to introduce a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) policy or a ‘corporate owned, personally enabled’ (COPE) policy. With these policies, the goal is to enable staff to use a single device for both work and personal use and thereby avoid the need to carry two phones. However, while this goal has merit, the challenge becomes how to then manage separate and distinct work and personal identities on the same device.

The management of two separate identities on one device is relatively easy to achieve with respect to data and applications. For example, both work and personal email accounts can be easily managed on the same device. But until now the only way to have separate mobile numbers for personal and work calls on one phone was by using Voice over IP (VoIP) - a technology which, due to its requirement for constant, high-quality internet coverage renders it not fit for purpose for the mobile professional. For that reason, organisations

have, until now, reluctantly provided staff with a dedicated second mobile phone.

There is now, however, a way to have two GSM numbers on one mobile phone, which works across all UK networks, and on iOS and Android smartphones. smartnumbers mobile is the first solution of its kind in the UK that provides a ‘virtual SIM’ – enabling organisations to provide staff with a second mobile number that works on their device of choice.

In this way, staff can maintain distinct personal and work communications on one phone – with full separation of calls, SMS and voicemail between personal and work mobile numbers. Not only does smartnumbers mobile eliminate the need to provide a second, dedicated mobile phone for work, but it also provides a suite of professional features normally only found on fixed line numbers, such as delegation, call redirection and call recording.

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The environmental benefits of adopting smartnumbers mobileBy adopting smartnumbers mobile you effectively wipe out the environmental footprint associated with providing staff with a mobile phone, including raw materials extraction, the manufacturing process, distribution and the energy usage associated with on-going use.

You also minimise the disposal problems, while at the same time cutting capital and operational expenditure on work-provided mobile devices. To summarise, with smartnumbers mobile you:

Eliminate organisational responsibility for mobile related rare-earth metals extraction and processing. Cut the carbon footprint associated with mobile phone manufacturing and distribution.Remove the need for your employees to keep two mobile phones charged.Eliminate organisational responsibility for proper disposal of end-of-life mobile devices. Benefit from a wide range of features not normally available on mobile phones.

With smartnumbers mobile, the ability to redirect calls to a different phone can have environmental benefits too. By automatically routing calls to a landline when staff are in an office or at home, power consumption is reduced by two thirds - even when the other person is using a mobile.

Smartphones have in the last decade become a tool required by many to efficiently and effectively do their jobs, and hence many people carry two, one for personal use and one for work. But the manufacture, distribution, charging and disposal of smartphones has a significant environmental impact.

As organisations strive to gain from the benefits of reducing their carbon footprint, they must continually seek new environmental initiatives to stay ahead of the competition. Whether the key drivers are company image, staff retention or maintaining the ability to charge a premium, ‘green’ organisations must continue to find new ways to reduce their carbon footprint and stand out from the crowd.

By adopting smartnumbers mobile, organisations can completely eliminate the carbon footprint associated with employees carrying two phones. That’s not only good news for staff who no longer have to carry two devices, or the organisation who can now reduce their organisational mobile spend overnight – it’s good for the planet too.

In conclusion

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How to get in touch

Take your organisation to a new level of environmental responsibility today with smartnumbers mobile. Call our sales team on 020 3162 3030 or visit www.smartnumbers.com.

smartnumbers mobile & The Carbon Trust

The Carbon Trust is an independent, expert partner of leading organisations around the world, helping them contribute to and benefit from a more sustainable future through carbon reduction, resource efficiency strategies and commercialising low carbon technologies.

The smartnumbers cloud is hosted on servers in Carbon Trust certified UK data centres.

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