Insights on the impact of telecommunication companies on the environment

Abstract To perform their business operations, telecommunication companies need to consume energy. This paper aims to analyze and compare the energy consumption and their greenhouse gas emissions for there of the biggest telecommunication companies: Vodafone, Orange and Telekom. Although the scientific literature proposed some analysis on the environmental measures that the telecommunication companies have to take, there is a shortage of researchers focused on GRI reporting data and the pairwise comparison method. The authors compared these telecommunication companies’ emissions under the following criteria: energy consumption (GRI 302-1), scope 1 (GRI 305-1), scope 2 (GRI 305-2) and scope 3 (GRI 305-3) greenhouse gas emissions, reduction of emissions (GRI 305-5), using the pairwise comparison method. To reduce their emissions, companies developed a sustainability strategy. This paper will further emphasize what are the plans to reduce emissions for the company which, following the analysis, pollutes the most. To provide an overview of the future of the company which, by the analysis, pollutes the most, the authors have identified and analyzed what are the main actions that the company should take to reduce their impact on the environment. To do so, the authors firstly analyze the causes of the pollution produced by the telecommunication company using Ishikawa diagram. Then, it identifies what are the main organizational processes that can be improved using APQC standardization, to show that the improvement can be made if the organization adjusts their organizational processes. This paper is an enhancement to the studies form the field because it provides a comparative analysis on three of the most competitive telecommunication companies in the world, uses GRI criteria and pairwise comparison method and gives an overview on the next steps for the telecommunication company to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.