Q&A: How is Openreach Boosting Sustainable Connectivity?

The telecommunications industry's environmental footprint has grown significantly with the explosive rise in global connectivity. 

As 5G networks expand and data centers multiply, telecoms face mounting pressure to balance digital transformation with ecological responsibility. 

Major carriers are increasingly adopting renewable energy solutions, implementing energy-efficient network architectures, and exploring innovative cooling systems for their infrastructure. 

The industry's path toward sustainability requires addressing not only direct emissions but also the environmental impact of its supply chain, from rare earth mineral extraction for devices to electronic waste management. 

Abby Chicken has been the Head of Sustainability at Openreach, a subsidiary of BT Group, for nearly three years. She has a background in sustainability that began in the Waitrose graduate programme and she has held positions at retail giants including John Lewis and Waitrose. Before joining Openreach she was the Sustainability Manager at Selfridges, and she volunteers for organisations including Surrey Wildlife Trust and Pride in London.

Abby sat down with Sustainability Magazine to discuss her role, and how Openreach is building sustainability into its operations.  

Please outline Openreach's sustainability strategy

At Openreach, our mission is to build full fibre for the nation. We're building fixed line broadband and my role within that is to ensure that we do that in as sustainable a way as possible. 

We are a subsidiary of BT Group and we have some really high level targets that are set at group level, but the operational impact is ours – we are the ones who are out in the field using the materials and having the impact.

We are aiming for net zero for our own operations by March 2031 and in our supply chain by 2041. 

There are three key elements that I focus on:

• Reducing the impact of our fleet
• Our resource use
• Becoming nature positive.

How is Openreach embedding sustainability into its fleet operations?

We drive the second biggest van fleet in the UK, so we are lowering our emissions, mostly through transitioning the van fleet to zero emissions, and mostly EV. 

The decarbonisation journey for a fleet really depends on the profile of your vehicles and what they are needed for – we can’t use bikes for example, because of the kit our engineers need to travel with. 

The majority of what we drive is medium and large format vans and for those parts of the fleet, EVs will be the solution. But for our larger installs we drive HGVs, and there just isn't really the solution in the EV market for that. 

We have explored hydrogen, but there's not the hydrogen charging infrastructure available to make that scalable yet.

Some of our suppliers are exploring things like electric diggers, but infrastructure is a concern because some of our jobs are really rural. 

We’re keeping our options open at the moment and converting the majority of the fleet and waiting for technology to settle on a route for the harder elements. We’re also talking to a lot of other fleet operators to find the best solutions.

We are making a huge amount of effort in terms of the EV fleet but there are contingencies on national infrastructure, collaboration, availability of the right kind of vehicle, etc. So whether the automotive manufacturers feel confident enough in the UK to invest and then we can get those vans at a price that works. So while we are absolutely on track at the moment, but it only takes a few of those bits to fall apart for it to become quite hard.

How is Openreach reducing its consumption?

A lot of our sustainability strategy is just using less and wasting less. I work with our renovation teams to look at ways that we can reduce the amount of material that we use in the first place.

That includes downsizing component parts, working with our suppliers to reduce packaging and working to recover certain materials.

As we build fibre, the copper network that has been in the ground for a really long time is becoming redundant so we're extracting that, recovering it and recycling it.

How is Openreach enabling a greener economy?

One of the reasons I love Openreach is because the product that we create is genuinely a good thing for sustainability. 

We are a fairly critical part underpinning the green economy because a lot of technology depends on digitalisation. I don't think there's been enough focus on actually what these technologies enable – everything from the internet of things, smart metering, telecommuting or working at home. We help with all of those enablement technologies. 

Also, the fibre broadband that we're rolling out now is 80% more energy efficient than the copper network that we're replacing. 

Although we're consuming quite a lot, it's passive, it's light – the copper wires have electricity going through them and actually a fibre optic cable is literally just light so it doesn't consume anything.

And it is more resilient to water floods – copper doesn't like being underwater, but fibre optic cable really isn't that bothered. 

Looking back to our fleet, it feeds the secondhand van market. As we convert to EV we will start feeding the secondhand market with EVs that will enable smaller businesses to convert. We are also lobbying for better public infrastructure to support our fleet, but also support everyone else.

Looking beyond the UK, we have quite a lot of muscle within the telco space. We are a big procurer of certain things, which means if we set the standards with our suppliers then that becomes the standard which then rolls out for lots of different businesses. 

Where we've said we want more sustainable content or reduced packaging, actually that then has an impact on the whole space. 

We work collaboratively with the Digital Connectivity Forum, and I sit on the climate sustainability working group, which is our suppliers, our customers, our competitors, all coming together and trying to solve these challenges. By doing what we do, we’re helping the industry more broadly.

What does it mean to be a ‘nature positive’ business?

The part of the strategy that is probably newest is becoming nature positive. We build to all communities in the UK including rural, and part of our strategy is that we don't leave communities behind. 

But obviously in those areas you're in potentially some very pristine national parks and nature reserves. 

So what are we doing to ensure that we're not having an impact on habitat species in those spaces?

We build in all kinds of landscapes and because we have the principle of no community left behind, our first philosophy is avoid. 

So if we can avoid building through a protected area like a nature reserve or a national park then we will. We are not hugely invasive like mining or construction, we don't really convert land. We move through it and then reinstate it, but making sure that we are building as sensitively as we can within those landscapes and we chose our route really carefully to avoid as much as we can. 

We do things like avoid bird nesting season and work with local agencies and landowners.

It’s a journey that we're going on. Once we know the impacts that we're having it’s a case of tipping that into positive? 

We're doing things that are positive, but there is a kind of cultural nature positivity that we want to generate as well because people love nature, and we want to harness that for positive sustainable impact. 

We’re trying to engage our people with sustainability on a personal level through sustainability. For example, we’re working with the RSPB to educate people about why we’re not building in bird nesting season.

Make sure you check out the latest edition of Sustainability Magazine and also sign up to our global conference series - Sustainability LIVE 2024

Sustainability Magazine is a BizClik brand