Our most significant transport emissions occur through network maintenance, retail distribution – both undertaken by contractors – and business travel.
We have partnered with Royal Mail to update 50,000 addresses in our supply chain to limit the environmental costs of duplication and misdirection.
During the year O2 in the UK scooped the Grand Prix title for its Letterbox Packaging scheme at the inaugural Green Awards 2006, staged by Carbon Neutral to recognise creativity and innovation in sustainability.
The award highlighted O2’s new method of sending mobile phones to customers in specially designed ‘green’ packages, which fit comfortably through letterboxes – initially trialled with one Nokia handset.
O2 UK realised that consumers do not need or want a phone re-charger every time they get a new phone. Removing these has made parcels less bulky and cut potential electronic waste.
It also means we don’t need to use couriers – which helps customers because they don’t need to be at home to receive their parcel. As well as reducing packaging and reducing waste, the change significantly reduces transport and delivery emissions.
In O2 Ireland, one of the main criteria for choosing our new head office location was the building’s proximity to public transport, thus reducing reliance on car travel for many of our employees.
1 Numbers for 2006 include Telefónica O2 Czech Republic for the first time (including the fixed-line telephone network).
2 O2 Germany, Manx Telecom and Telefónica O2 Czech Republic report combined figures for business travel and network
maintenance. Data for Germany includes a significant element of private miles in company cars.
3 O2 UK is the only company able to provide figures for retail distribution for 2006.
4 Conversion factors used: Medium petrol car (1.4–2.1 litres) 1 km = 0.19 kg CO2; Average diesel car 1 km = 0.17 kg CO2 (Defra 2005).
Dual fuel/LPG vehicles have been assumed to produce approximately 20% less CO2 than diesel vehicles (UK Dept for Transport).
Diesel heavy goods vehicle 1 km = 1.18 kg CO2 (Defra 2005).
Gathering reliable and consistent data about road transport is not easy, so the figures we have reported this year do not show a comparable year-on-year trend analysis. We are striving to improve our data collection in this area.
It is a challenge to balance the demands of a growing business with our environmental targets for transport and business mileage.
In 2006 we began to collect better figures on our mileage and transport emissions; however, we recognise this is a very complex area where it is difficult to collect data, and therefore believe it may take some time to collect complete data.
Our business mileage continued to increase significantly, excluding the effects of rail and air travel, so we know we have a great deal more to do.
We remain committed to using our own services – such as audio, video and web conferencing, as well as remote access to our internal systems – to cut business travel by O2 employees. We use ‘Intraview’ online video communication in our offices, which helps reduce the need for travel to corporate briefings in the UK.
Following a green travel survey in 2004, we encourage employee car-share schemes in Leeds, Bury and Preston Brook. These schemes now have 349 participants who are registered and available to car share.
In 2006 we began a project with the Arlington Business Centre in Leeds (our largest base of UK employees) and two partner companies to test a geographic information system (GIS), which will enable us to identify clusters of employees through their postcodes with a view to offering sustainable transport plans, possibly subsidised, to encourage them to travel by bus.
Several projects have helped to reduce harmful emissions from our business mileage:
The most significant air emissions that are made by O2 relate to vehicle exhaust emissions from business travel. In 2006, emissions from business travel were as follows: NOx - 39,138 kilogrammes (kg); CO - 217,398 kg; and particulate matter (PM10) - 4,535 kg.
1 Numbers for 2006 include Telefonica O2 Czech Republic for the first time (including the fixed-line telephone network).
O2 Germany, Manx Telecom and Telefonica O2 Czech Republic report combined figures for business travel and network maintenance.
Data for Germany also includes a significant element of private miles in company cars.
The increase in 2006 is partly due to improved data collection. We also include data from Telefónica O2 Czech Republic for the first time in 2006, which alone accounts for 82,000,000 additional kilometres compared to 2005/06 (including mobile and fixed-network travel, as well as network maintenance).
O2 UK is the only business to provide data on network maintenance to date, and the increase here is partly due to the expansion of the network, but also due to an improvement in data collection.
1 Covers travel incurred (mostly by contractors) in maintaining the network of switching sites and base stations.
For 2006 data covers only O2 UK and O2 Ireland. O2 Germany, Manx Telecom and Telefónica O2 Czech Republic report
combined figures for business travel and network maintenance and these numbers are included in Business Road Travel.
Airwave has not been able to report numbers for 2006.
O2 UK is the only business to provide data on retail distribution to date, and the increase here is partly due to the expansion of the network, but also due to an improvement in data collection.
We have yet to collect data for our rail transport use across the Group and cannot provide accurate numbers on the effect of rail transport by O2 employees.
In Germany, we have started collecting these numbers. In 2006, the total distance travelled by rail was 1,205,695 kms.
We have yet to collect data for our air transport use across the Group and cannot provide accurate data on the effect of air travel by O2 employees.
In Germany, we have started collecting these numbers. In 2006, the total distance travelled by air was 9,641,376 miles.
