Virgin Media O2 UK Cuts Carbon Emissions by 29% Since 2020
Broadband ISP and mobile operator VMO2 (Virgin Media and O2) has today issued a progress update on their ongoing efforts to reduce their environmental emissions, which among other things reveals that they’ve now cut their carbon by 29% against the 2020 baseline.
The operator currently plans to cut carbon and to achieve Net Zero across its operations, products, and supply chain (Scopes 1,2 and 3) by the end of 2040 (i.e. removing as many emissions as they produce). The related targets for this are being validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
The latest progress update, which charts what has happened over the past 12 months, covers three areas: Carbon, Circularity and Communities.
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VMO2’s Progress on Climate Goals
Carbon
➤ Virgin Media O2 reduced carbon emissions (Scopes 1 and 2) by 29% in 2022 against its 2020 baseline;
➤ Its products and services prevented more than 29 million tonnes of carbon entering Earth’s atmosphere last year by powering Internet of Things applications such as smart metering, resulting in more energy efficient homes and businesses across the UK, and by supporting people to be more sustainable, such as working from home and using video calling software – preventing carbon emissions from either cars or public transport;
➤ Virgin Media O2 became the first UK telco to be recognised by the Carbon Trust for its net zero plan, being awarded the Advancing Level of the organisation’s Route to Net Zero Standard;
➤ It has introduced more than 70 electric vans with a pledge to electrify its fleet by the end of 2030.
Circularity
➤ Virgin Media O2 supported consumers to carry out 2.4 million ‘circular actions’ in 2022 against its 10 million 2025 goal. This includes encouraging customers to buy ‘like new’ second-hand devices and using initiatives such as O2 Recycle to sustainably dispose of unwanted tech;
➤ O2 Recycle saw more than 250,000 devices recycled in the past year, with zero going to landfill, paying out more than £36 million to consumers;
➤ More than 10 million routers and set-top boxes have now been refurbished and reused since 2014;
➤ The company also launched a £500,000 initiative, the Time after Time e-waste fund, providing grants of up to £75,000 to community groups across the country to tackle e-waste and to promote circularity – with the winners to be announced soon.
Communities
➤ Virgin Media O2 has supported more than 1.5 million people to improve their digital skills and confidence to use the internet by supporting initiatives via its strategic partnerships with Good Things Foundation and Internet Matters. As a result of this significant achievement, the company has extended its goal to support six million people – from its original goal of two million – by the end of 2025;
➤ It has supported the opening of the UK’s 1,000th National Databank Hub in partnership with digital inclusion charity, Good Things Foundation, providing more than 70,000 free O2 SIM cards and 50,000 free O2 data vouchers to people in need since the initiative began. It has also committed more than 61 million GB of free O2 data to the initiative by the end of 2025;
➤ The company’s Community Calling initiative in partnership with environmental charity, Hubbub, has now rehomed more than 15,000 smartphones combined with free data, texts and calls for people who need them since the scheme began in 2020;
➤ More than 120,000 people nationwide have been helped by Virgin Media O2 employees using their five annual paid volunteering days to support community projects.
Lutz Schüler, CEO of Virgin Media O2, said: “With the backing of the SBTi, as well as the Carbon Trust, we’re on track to deliver our net zero carbon plan by the end of 2040 – 10 years ahead of the UK’s net zero goal – reducing carbon emissions in-line with best-practice climate science.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Maybe they should focus on getting their prices down rather than putting out PR to boost their ESG scores
Netzero is a destructive and unscientific cult
Whatever your views on the climate and related debates, a business that has a goal toward reducing its more negative impacts on the natural environment still seems like more of a positive than a negative to me.
It’s only “negative impacts” if you’ve already bought into the cult
Perfect example: the EVs. EVs actually take a huge negative impact on the world as they require minerals like Cobalt, mined using child slave labour in Congo
The CO2 gas cars emit is a gas that occurs naturally that is plant food. The planet in the past has had far more CO2 than it does now
Humans are made out of carbon, as are all of lifeforms. Anyone saying carbon is bad is deeply ignorant
whatever you believe Sam, emissions and energy consumption are usually directly linked.
Surely you should be pleased to see that they’re not wasting energy, a cost which is usually passed straight onto the consumer?
Depends how you look at things, John.
On an EU level, we are a ‘continent’ which essentially does not have enough natural resources (coal, oil, gas, metallic minerals etc.) to support its own economy (while the general mining activity is performed in low-wage coutnries). This is generally seem as a non-ideal situation for managing an economy. It is preferable to adopt a recycling policy for tech waste, principally because tech waste contains gold and tin, among other things.
Sure, not everybody can/will want to take part, but if people do want to take part they can.
Frankly, Britain has the wind power resources to (on average) power itself and export green hydrogen, so that is why we are sold on a ‘net zero’ economy. We have the means to support ourselves entirely from wind power. And before you say it, hydro, battery and green hydrogen is perfectly feasible technology for doing this, and the last round of offshore wind came in at 40% of the cost of new nuclear, so it’s not like cost is a barrier anymore.
Virgin is not saving costs for their customers, it is actively increasing them every year!
No country can call itself as developed when people struggle to pay for expensive electricity, or even the basic act of going somewhere with the very expensive gas.
In Norway, it is now more expensive to charge an EV than a gas car (besides taking a LOT longer too). This is completely correlated to the failure by the govt and the UK is going down the same path
People like to parade wind as green completely ignoring the fact that it wipes out bird populations and needs a lot of maintenance that it barely pays off.
VM could improve a great deal on their recovery of older Hubs and TV boxes, when an item can be reused they are keen to get it back and it seems.. add to the green figures in this report.
The untold bit of the story is all the legacy kit that has no value, is left for customers to dispose of. Since 2014 I can confidently say this runs into millions of items of waste electronic equipment.
If you read the comments Lutz… be responsible for old kit too!
Can’t say that net zero by 2040, for a business that is largely just services, is particularly ambitious.
But there’s huge scope for telcos like VMO2 to save power and therefore emissions by phasing out legacy equipment – moving from DOCSIS to XGS-PON, turning off 3G etc will probably save a massive amount
@Chris: Virgin Media has been working on migrating to XGS-PON for 14 months, end date for project is end of 2028. There will be some savings for the HFC network as the RF amps will be gradually removed (so reducing the power requirements) and for the RFoG network the inverted nodes (and their power supplies) will no longer be needed but PON requires new VHUBs and ONTs which are all powered. It does seem, though, as if VM will be going with a combined ONT/router so a separate ONT won’t be needed. There will be other savings coming later when a load of legacy kit will be dumped when VOIP is implemented.
CO2 ain’t pollution, bruh, it is plant food. If we continue to reduce it it will result in an increase in crop failure and desertification which will trigger a global famine.
Projections with increased CO2 are actually showing that the world will be a lot more covered with vegetation and forests, including deserts transitioning to having a lot more wildlife
We aren’t reducing it. We’re reducing our artificial emissions of it. We get to carbon neutral and nature decides how atmospheric CO2 progresses.
As it should be.
Except whatever humans do, it is absolutely meaningless compared to actual nature
Etna eruption emitting more CO2 in a few days than the entire history of mankind COMBINED
I have to say some of the comments on this one are comedy gold. Trolls are starting to outdo themselves more every day.
Anybody found any substantive numbers? I wondered what proportion of this magical reduction in emissions was outside of VMO2’s control, primarily through changes in electricity generation emissions, and also what change in energy use by VMO2 there was over this time period? Seems curious that there’s so little substance in the announcement.
I’m sure it’s available somewhere, but as with all VM web activity, nothing’s easy to find.