There’s growing expectation from consumers, businesses, governments, and shareholders, that their favored products, brands and service providers strive to be as sustainable as possible. Communications service providers absolutely recognize the importance of sustainability to the world—and their businesses—and are putting environmental and climate issues at the top of their strategic agendas.

At Nokia, we’ve also set a high bar in our commitment to sustainability. We know that what we do helps others reduce their environmental impact, but that’s not enough: our Broadband Zero approach is seeing us make significant improvements to sustainability across every phase of our product lifecycle, from design through to end of life.

Many manufacturers are moving away from traditional TMW (Take, Make, Waste) business models: taking natural resources and making a product, which becomes waste as those products reach end of life or are returned. In our efforts to minimize the impact of our operations, we offer broadband providers circular options where we refurbish their existing equipment to prolong its life. Every time we refurbish rather than replace, we are reducing the use of new raw materials, reducing emissions from the manufacturing process and transportation, and reducing waste. As a matter of fact, refurbishment can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80 percent.

Our refurbishment program encourages operators to return equipment which customers have sent back and that otherwise would be scrapped. From experience we have seen that more than 75 percent of returned CPE devices can be given a new lease of life after refurbishment.

If we take a typical broadband network and the hundreds of thousands of home gateways out there, field returns could be the result of many common scenarios that include:

• A residential move.
• A service not operating as expected.
• A perceived issue with the CPE.

Those field returns become waste in a linear business model and hinder you in reaching sustainability targets. But a more sustainable approach, like refurbishment, helps to enhance the attractiveness of your products and services in the eyes of your customers, and when it also helps to mitigate some of your supply-chain constraints and save some costs, then there’s absolutely no reason not to indulge. Refurbishment can have much shorter lead times than sourcing new and is obviously less expensive than buying new.

But if you’ve ever hesitated about buying, say, a refurbished iPhone, you’ll know how important trust is in your decision-making. And in the case of your broadband network, can you be sure that the refurbished equipment will not compromise your services and negatively impact customers?

Well, of course our customers trust us for the quality of our new products, and we’ve introduced the Nokia CPE Refurbishment Service to extend that trust to our refurbished equipment as well. The service is built upon Nokia’s expertise and experience with refurbishment services. It applies Nokia Intellectual Property (IP), software, test specs and test equipment to test returned units from the field. Refurbished units, Nokia approved accessories and ancillary parts comprise the refurbishment kit to allow units to be redeployed in the service provider network and replace returned units, completing the circular business model. And we’ve added a best-in-class service level agreement that guarantees a fast turn-around time.

I know our customers are as committed to sustainability as we are. We’ll leave no stone unturned in our efforts to reach Broadband Zero and help our customers to do the same.