Best Environmental Management Practice in the Telecommunications and ICT Services sector

The steady growth over the past decades of the Telecommunications and ICT Services sector, and its uninterrupted progress with the constant provision of renewed and ever-faster services as well as new applications, has transformed many aspects of our society and lives but has also spurred the development of ever more power- and resource-hungry systems, contributing to the sector’s ever-growing environmental footprint. On the basis of an in-depth analysis of the actions implemented by environmental front runners and of existing EU and industry initiatives addressing the environmental performance of the sector, this report describes a set of best practices with high potential for larger uptake. These are called Best Environmental Management Practices (BEMPs). The BEMPs, identified in close cooperation with a technical working group comprising experts from the sector, cover improvement of environmental performance across all significant environmental aspects (energy consumption, resource consumption, etc.) at the different life cycle stages (planning and design, installation, operation, end-of-life management, etc.) and for different ICT assets (software, data centres, etc.). Besides actions aimed at reducing the environmental impact of Telecommunications and ICT Services operations (with a special focus on data centres and telecommunications networks), the report also identifies best practices in the ICT sector that contribute towards reducing the environmental impact of other sectors of the economy ("greening by ICT" measures).The report gives a wide range of information (environmental benefits, economics, indicators, benchmarks, references, etc.) for each of the proposed best practices in order to be a source of inspiration and guidance for any company in the sector wishing to improve its environmental performance. In addition, it will be the technical basis for a Sectoral Reference Document on Best Environmental Management Practice for the Telecommunications and ICT Services sector, to be produced by the European Commission according to Article 46 of Regulation (EC) No 1221/2009 (EMAS Regulation).