How the BT smartnumbers service can enhance your Corporate Social responsibility program

1. An environmental perspective
Sustainability
and the corporate mobile

2. 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

3. Executive summary
Sustainability 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.
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 3
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.

4. 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
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 4
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.

5. Sustainability and the
work-provided smartphone
When 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.
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 5
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.

6. 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
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 6

7. A significant
environmental impact
The 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.
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 7

8. 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.
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 8

9. 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.

10. Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 10
The environmental
benefits of adopting
smartnumbers mobile
By 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.

11. 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
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 11

12. 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.
Sustainability and the corporate mobile: an environmental perspective 12