The environmental impacts of our operations are diverse. Through our mobile network, Vodafone's footprint spans the length of the country, across urban and rural locations. This network requires energy to run and produces electronic waste when we maintain and upgrade it. Electronic waste is also the result of the sale of hundreds of thousands of new mobile handsets each year, into a country where phones already outnumber people.
For our business to be sustainable we must be responsible in our management of these impacts. We can also take advantage of the opportunities to reduce the environmental impacts of our customers through smart application of our technology.
Vodafone has made a global climate change commitment to reduce its global emissions by 50 percent by 2020, against baseline emissions from 2006. Vodafone New Zealand's emissions are included in this target. This reduction is intended to be a direct reduction in emissions from our operations, without any offsetting.
Vodafone New Zealand's carbon dioxide emissions increased 6.5 percent last year. Our network operations account for 80 percent of our carbon emissions. Network emissions increased 8.9 percent, or 1398 tonnes, over the past year. This increase is due to investment in increased network capacity.
Emissions reductions from other sources partially offset the network growth. Transport emissions, which include air travel and vehicle fuel, reduced 2.6 percent. We also achieved an emissions reduction of 6.1 percent from our offices.
Our long-term goal is to reduce outright emissions across all our operations. At present we are running two networks in parallel, both 2G and 3G. Ultimately, as our customers migrate across to the newer and more efficient 3G network, we will be able to decommission 2G network equipment post 2020.
The Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will also require an increase in our network footprint. In April 2011 Vodafone and Telecom NZ were selected as the Government's preferred partners for the Government's rural broadband initiative. Over the next six years Vodafone will construct 154 new fibre-connected cell phone towers and upgrade 380 existing cell towers. These new and upgraded sites will provide wireless broadband access to areas previously not serviced by high-speed data.
Fourth generation networks (4G, or LTE) are likely to integrate 2G and 3G technology in one box, delivering further efficiency gains. In the meantime, our focus is to run and deploy our current networks efficiently. This includes optimising current technology, adopting efficient solutions such as free-cooling air-conditioning and assessing onsite renewables such as wind and solar generation for remote mobile phone sites and core network hubs.
| 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Network | 17,124 | 15,726 | 14,608 |
| Office | 2,137 | 2,277 | 2,482 |
| Retail | 222 | 151 | 162 |
| Transport | 1,669* | 1,714* | 1,909* |
| TOTAL | 21,152 | 19,867 | 19,159 |
* Air travel figures are for the 12 months from February.
Mobile recycling is one of our key environmental initiatives. The mobile industry has shown leadership as one of the first to collect consumer electronic waste. We hope that with the introduction of the Waste Minimisation Act, similar product stewardship schemes will be introduced across many other products groups, raising public awareness of the importance of recycling and the availability of recycling facilities.
If a phone is still in good working order, the best environmental outcome is for that phone to be reused by someone else. A working phone also represents a social and economic opportunity for someone in the developing world, whom otherwise would not have access to any form of telecommunications.
In March 2010 we launched a new mobile recycling partnership with the Starship Foundation. The Starship Foundation launched their own rival mobile recycling programme in 2009, and had been running a scheme whereby suitable collected phones were resold into developing countries. The proceeds from these sales are directed to the Starship Children's Hospital.
The high profile of the Starship cause, and the participation of other industry members in the scheme, have assisted in raising awareness of mobile recycling and consequently increased collection performance. Last year the Starship Foundation scheme collected 143,387 handsets. This compares very favourably to Vodafone's own collection performance from the previous year (2009), which netted only 14,236 handsets.
In the next year ahead we will work with our industry counterparts to achieve accreditation of the scheme under the Product Stewardship provisions of the Waste Minimisation Act. This will require the scheme to produce an annual performance report, increasing transparency.
We have an ongoing commitment to reuse or recycle more than 95% of the waste from our network operations. In the past year we reused or recycled 96.2% of our network waste by mass.
Our network waste data is sourced from a raft of network contractors, suppliers and service providers. In previous years we have commissioned an independent audit on our network waste stream, to ensure we are capturing all sources of network waste, to test our reporting system and our data accuracy. These audits have shown areas for improvement, and highlighted gaps in reporting across our internal network team, which is split into deployment, transmission and maintenance units. We are confident in the accuracy of the data reported; however we are working to improve data capture to ensure any gaps are filled to get a complete picture of network waste.
Some of our older air conditioning units contain R-22, an ozone depleting HCFC used as a refrigerant. Our target is to replace all R-22 units by 2012. All sales and import of R-22 will cease across New Zealand from 2015.
| 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disposed (kg) | 2,698 | 2,293 | 963 |
| Reused or Recycled (kg) | 69,140 | 69,844 | 25,191 |
| % Recycled/Reused | 96.2 | 96.8 | 96.3 |
