Initiatives to help combat climate change have increasingly creeped into companies’ long-term business goals over the years. Many are striving to reach environmental targets – oil giants like BP, Eni SpA, Equinor ASA, Shell, Respol SA, and Total SA have all announced ambitious goals in the last year to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Accompanying these announcements have also been pledges to invest heavily in renewables.
Currently, the emphasis is on transition and starting to rollout efforts that make operations more sustainable. It’s impossible for an organization to become “100 percent green” overnight. The reality is, starting with smaller steps and making the way up to large strides is an efficient strategy. There is an abundance of tools and processes at our disposal to make business as green as possible.
Our specialty, of course, is green market solutions for the telecom industry. The processes we have in place at Sagent benefit the environment, along with our customer’s finances and corporate sustainability programs. We pride ourselves on moving network equipment from the typical linear lifestyle to a circular one.
What is a circular economy?
It’s when raw resources are fed back into the system, ideally creating a world where all energy and materials stay in a closed loop, which is critical to solving the environmental issues, the growing crisis of dwindling resources, and lessening the amount of tech equipment sitting in landfills.
In the typical linear lifecycle of telecom equipment, a product gets designed, manufactured, deployed, sold, used in a network, and gets pulled out once an operator no longer has a purpose for it. A tier-one network operator might use a certain tech for three to seven years, and then it’s no longer useful to them.
How we can help
At Sagent, we’ve completely flipped this process on its head. We know there’s always an opportunity to reuse those network assets and make the equipment lifecycle circular. Tier-two operators (smaller carriers or international operators) still have a useful purpose for those assets. So, we refurbish those assets and then move them into another network, and then hopefully, we’ll do that a second or a third time as well.
Using our hierarchy of asset disposition, we’re stretching the product lifecycle as long as we can. First, we reuse the equipment in the customer’s network if possible. Our next option is to remarket or resell for maximum return to customer and waste stream diversion. We look at recycling as the final option, which we’re typically able to avoid by maintaining efficiency in legacy network equipment and putting it through a few reuse cycles.
When enterprises don’t have a reliable process in place for dispositioning their assets, there’s a detrimental financial impact. Companies face loss of inventory visibility, inaccurate cost / depreciation accounting, unnecessary handling & storage costs, and a loss of revenue from potential resale of obsolete and excess materials.
On the contrary, there’s a ton of positive environmental impacts when you have a process in place:
- Lower emissions, pollution, and energy investment involved in manufacturing equipment
- Reduce material inputs including metals, plastics, polymers, and highly refined glass
- Delay additions to the e-waste stream, recycling and disposing of components only after they have achieved maximum service life
Gone are the days of one “linear lifecycle” for telecom equipment. Moving your assets into the circular economy is the simple answer for telecom companies looking to become more sustainable. To learn more about partnering with Sagent for your company’s green market solutions, please contact us today.