Big Changes Start Small

Large business corporations are expected to assume ecological and social responsibility and to adopt sustainable business practices. Deutsche Telekom has been fulfilling this expectation for many years and, in September 2009, began to extend its radius of action to the environment and society and to actively involve customers through its communication campaign for sustainability.

“Big changes start small” is the theme of the campaign for the environment and society, and it focuses on presenting Deutsche Telekom products and services with which customers can act responsibly and thus play an active role in supporting sustainable development. “This campaign is not about clapping ourselves on the back. We want to show that entrepreneurial action, appropriate consumption, and sustainability can be meaningfully combined,” commented chairman of the Management Board at Deutsche Telekom, René Obermann, at the launch of the campaign, which will be featured in advertisements appearing in print, online media, and on television.

The campaign focuses not on the company itself but on its end consumers and is based on the following central idea: All Telekom customers can achieve far more in total – if they are adequately informed. After all, people can make a bigger difference collectively than individually. The contribution that people can make as individuals compared with what they can do as part of a large group is visualized at www.millionen-fangen-an.de (millions of people begin). The site currently presents the topics of online billing, child protection software, download portals, and cell phone recycling. Online billing can be used to illustrate the calculation of one’s own individual contribution and that of a whole group of customers. Online billing saves around three sheets of paper per month for each customer, so that for just one million customers, for example, the volume of paper saved would reach a height of 240 meters – higher than the 202-meter Trump Tower. More than 14 million Deutsche Telekom customers already use the online billing service in Germany alone, and more new users will help to effect a major change in paper consumption habits and help in saving the environment.

More than 13 other topics that illustrate the concept of ecological and social sustainability are planned for the next two years of the campaign. These will include topics on telephone and data conference calls, smart metering, climate-neutral and family-friendly phones, and the power consumption of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, whose office power has been supplied completely from renewable energy sources since 2008. The company will also be calling on people to take action beginning in 2010, for example, to return their old cell phones for reuse or recycling. Fully-functional, used handsets will be sent to Africa or Asia and defective devices will be dismantled in the recycling process. The materials retrieved – more than 80 percent of a cell phone is reusable – could be made available to the automotive supplier industry, for instance, where they would help to reduce the consumption of resources. Furthermore, the mentioned sustainability campaign’s Internet platform will be made increasingly interactive for customers. All in all, there are many points at which customers themselves can take action.

A sustainability campaign is, however, only feasible and credible if the company running it embraces and practices corporate social responsibility itself. As a corporate group, Deutsche Telekom has already pursued a policy of sustainable corporate governance for many years and has been, for example, orchestrating the recycling of old devices since the 1970s. We initiated our commitment to climate protection in 1995 and adopted our own climate protection targets the following year. In 2000, we were one of the founding members of the UN Global Compact and, in 2003, adopted our Social Charter to ensure that our employees and suppliers comply with ecological and social standards. In 2007, we were commended by the World Wildlife Fund as the corporate group best equipped for climate change and, in September 2009, signed the Copenhagen Communiqué of the European Leaders Group on Climate Change.

This year, it was only logical for us to venture even further into the public eye with the issue of sustainability in order to rouse and activate awareness for this important issue and to join with our customers to achieve far more than we could alone. The fact that many people are already highly sensitized to this issue is an important element for moving forward. The changing and growing demand among customers for attractive and sustainable products from responsible companies offers a major opportunity to promote products and business models that are not only economically viable but, above all, pave the way to a sustainable consumer society. This is an objective that we want to contribute to.