Connectivity today is no longer just a commercial service – it is critical national infrastructure underpinning how people work, learn, access healthcare and participate in society. Virgin Media O2 is at the heart of the UK’s digital economy, providing broadband and mobile connectivity to more than 45 million connections across homes and businesses nationwide. For Chief Sustainability Officer Dana Haidan, that scale brings responsibility and opportunity. 

Her mandate is simple to state and complex to deliver – she describes her job as embedding sustainability into strategic, operational and investment decisions across the 16,000‑strong organisation.

“The role of telecommunications in modern economies has fundamentally changed,” she says. “Connectivity is now as essential as electricity or transport. That means sustainability in our sector is not just about reducing emissions, it’s also about ensuring the infrastructure society relies on remains resilient, responsible and future-ready.

“It should not be about only setting the targets – success is when sustainability is integrated into how the business makes decisions. How we invest, how we design networks, how we source equipment and how we serve customers.”

That means working across engineering, commercial, procurement, technology and risk to align climate action, resource efficiency, social impact and digital responsibility with the company’s core business model. It also means changing mindsets about what good sustainability work looks like.

Moving beyond reporting

Like many corporate leaders, Dana has spent much of her career “drowning in reporting”.

ESG disclosure has become a dominant part of the sustainability profession, driven by investor expectations and tightening regulation. Dana is candid about the downside, arguing that reporting has too often become the end in itself rather than the means to drive better decisions.

“We’re always counting the holes in the sinking boat,” she explains. “But we’re not stopping to decide what to do about the holes causing us to sink.”

For Virgin Media O2, the move is now towards using data to inform action. That means investing as much in execution and change as in metrics and dashboards. Dana says she wants the business to strike “more of a balance between reporting and doing something about the data”. Her role, and that of her nine‑strong sustainability team, is to ensure the rigour of evidence remains, while shifting the emphasis to impact. An example of that is turning Virgin Media O2’s TCFD disclosures into the ‘Cost of Doing Nothing’ paper that is regularly updated and used to engage key parts of the business to understand the impacts of business decisions long-term. 

From Better Connections to responsible business

Virgin Media O2 was formed in 2020 after Virgin Media and O2 joined forces, the largest merger in UK telecom history. Both legacy companies arrived with established sustainability programmes organised around ESG pillars. Post‑merger, the challenge was to unify that heritage into a single strategy for a much larger, infrastructure‑heavy business.

In 2021, the company launched the Better Connections Plan, setting out ambitions to reach net zero across its full value chain by 2040, 10 years ahead of the UK’s national target. Despite customer demand for data steadily increasing, Virgin Media O2 has reduced its carbon per gigabyte overtime. It has already cut Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 63% against a 2020 baseline and is on track to reduce operational emissions by 90% by 2030.

It has also enabled customers to take over 12 million “circular actions” through embedding recycling, refurbishing and repairing devices into the customer journey, taking as much of the friction as possible from the process, with zero devices traded-in going to landfill.

But Dana is clear that the next phase has to go further. The company is now launching a broader responsible business strategy which moves deliberately away from the narrow framing of “sustainability”. She argues that the term can push teams into “greening the business”, without addressing wider issues that matter to customers and stakeholders.

The new responsible business agenda therefore centres on two priorities: delivering business resilience and driving digital wellbeing.

“We are evolving from a traditional sustainability programme into a broader responsible business strategy,” Dana explains. “Because the issues we’re addressing – like climate resilience, digital wellbeing, resource scarcity, and many more – go far beyond the traditional boundaries of ESG. These are not peripheral issues, they are central to the long-term success of a digital infrastructure company.”

Decarbonising and future‑proofing critical networks

Telecommunications networks are now treated as critical national infrastructure, essential for both economic competitiveness and social participation. Ensuring their resilience in a changing climate is therefore a strategic priority.

The first pillar of Virgin Media O2’s responsible business strategy focuses on the long‑term resilience of that infrastructure in a changing climate and constrained resource landscape.

Dana says: “We’re asking new questions: How will climate risks affect network reliability? How do we design infrastructure that can withstand more extreme weather? How do we ensure the materials we depend on remain available?”

Infrastructure resilience is becoming one of the defining sustainability challenges of the telecom sector. Climate resilience, Dana notes, has not historically received the same attention as decarbonisation. To date, the emphasis has been on “greening the network”, replacing fossil‑fuel‑powered sites with renewable electricity and improving energy efficiency.

Now, Virgin Media O2 is looking more deeply at how extreme weather and climate‑related risks can disrupt connectivity. The company is embedding climate and nature risk into network planning and investment decisions, alongside continued decarbonisation.

That involves cutting energy use in data centres, ramping up renewable electricity, and using technologies such as IoT and AI to optimise performance.

It also means asking harder questions about resource security. Dana points to recent supply chain constraints on components such as memory chips, driven by global demand for AI. For a business that sells devices and depends on hardware, this is no longer just an environmental concern – it is a core business risk.

“Our question now is how to extend device life,” she explains. “It’s not only an environmental imperative – it’s a business model priority.”

Circularity: from e‑waste to “every device lives twice”

Electronic waste, or e‑waste, is the fastest‑growing waste stream in the world. The UK has one of the highest levels of e‑waste per person globally, ranking second only to Norway.

Virgin Media O2 has been tackling this challenge through O2 Recycle, one of the UK’s leading take‑back and recycling schemes. Over more than a decade, the programme has helped prevent around four million devices from ending up in landfill, while supporting customers to trade‑in old phones easily.

Dana’s focus now is on radically extending the life of hardware, both for customer devices and for network equipment. “One of our key goals is that every device lives twice,” she reveals. “It’s a bold, reuse‑first commitment with recycling as a last resort.”

The strategy rests on three pillars. First, making repair and refurbishment frictionless, mainstream and attractive to customers, backed by clear language and positioning. Second, increasing recovery rates via frictionless take‑back journeys, so idle devices in drawers re‑enter circulation instead of gathering dust. Third, working with specialist partners on advanced recycling for network and data centre equipment, using advances such as urban mining and bioleaching to recover copper, gold and rare earth materials.

Virgin Media O2 recently signed a three-year partnership with NTT DATA and Net2Source (N2S) to change how end-of-life IT equipment is managed across data centres which will see over 40,000 IT assets being sustainably processed, more than 33.5 tonnes of equipment handled in 2025 alone, 322 tonnes of CO₂e avoided through reuse, refurbishment and low-impact recycling, and importantly, nothing goes to landfill.

Connecting circularity and digital inclusion

Dana and her team are determined to treat unused devices as assets, not waste. That principle underpins Community Calling, a long‑running programme that rehomes smartphones with people who lack access to a device.

Working with charity partners, Virgin Media O2 has donated over 20,000 refurbished phones to organisations across the UK, from domestic violence services to refugee support and NHS trusts.

The company has also partnered with Coventry City Council on a local device bank, part of the #CovConnects digital inclusion initiative. The scheme takes surplus devices from businesses and public bodies, wipes and refurbishes them, then redistributes them to residents who need them. In Coventry alone, more than 5,000 devices have already been rehomed through the partnership. Dana calls this a “reuse‑first model of circularity” that can be replicated nationwide.

“Our ambition is a circular model, enabled by local device banks, that can be rolled out across the UK,” she says.

Virgin Media O2 is also a founding partner of the National Databank, run with digital inclusion charity Good Things Foundation. Described as a “foodbank for data”, it provides free mobile data, texts and calls to people experiencing data poverty via thousands of community hubs. By 2024, the National Databank had connected hundreds of thousands of people, with Virgin Media O2 committing additional devices through the National Device Bank.

“We treat devices as assets that can tackle digital exclusion,” she explains. “That intersection between circularity and inclusion is central to our strategy.”

Customers, expectations and the utility mindset

Despite the breadth of this agenda, Dana is pragmatic about how it plays with customers. She does not expect sustainability credentials alone to drive mass switching in a market where connectivity behaves like a utility like water or power. Instead, she views sustainability and responsibility as hygiene factors that underpin reputation and long‑term loyalty.

Polling and reputation tracking suggest that customers respond positively when they learn, for example, that Virgin Media O2’s network is powered by 100% renewable electricity or that plastic has been removed from packaging. But at the point of purchase, performance and price still dominate.

Dana’s aim is therefore to embed sustainability so deeply into the core service that it becomes inseparable from quality, reliability and fairness. That, she believes, is how a “utility‑like” business can deliver meaningful change while meeting everyday expectations.

“We’re here to keep people connected,” Dana says. “Our job is to make sure we do that in a way that’s fair, resilient and better for the planet.”