- Recycling and reselling equipment can help telcos accelerate network upgrades, said TXO
- Telcos can fetch a good price for the metals in old equipment
- TXO’s new carbon calculator aims to help companies quantify emission savings
Sustainability is obviously a big deal across all industries, telecom included. But it’s not just about environmental responsibility. Recycling and reselling legacy equipment can help telcos upgrade their networks faster, plus it can give them some extra cash, according to TXO.
TXO is a U.K-based asset management company that specializes in the circular economy, which essentially promotes reusing and refurbishing existing materials and products for as long as possible.
“I think there was a reluctance, maybe a decade ago, for the manufacturers to encourage the circular economy because they wanted to sell new equipment,” Julia Evans, Group Operations Director at TXO, told Fierce.
More than just a green initiative
Now, it’s a whole different ball game. Operators are continuing to ramp up network upgrades, replacing copper with fiber and other, newer technologies.
But those upgrades aren’t happening as fast as operators would like, often because they don’t have enough cash to get the job done, she said. Vendors also realize they need customers to upgrade their networks if they want more revenue.
If telcos can resell or recycle their old equipment “and get good money for it, the upgrades will happen quicker,” Evans said. “I think there’s a real incentive now for the industry to embrace this.”
What TXO can do is extract metals like copper, gold, silver and palladium from the equipment and tell customers how much “by the gram” they have. Companies can then exchange those metals for a sizable amount of cash.
Extracta Group similarly says it can remove copper cables from networks and help operators fetch the best possible price for the salvaged metal (and before thieves get to the copper first).
Most telcos just take the cash, but they do have the option to recycle the copper and then put it back into their networks, Evans noted.
TXO’s sustainability strategy
TXO boasts a number of big-name European telco customers, including BT, Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Telia, Vodafone as well as AT&T in the U.S. It also recently acquired network infrastructure provider AirWay to expand its presence in North America.
To assist companies with their emission reduction goals, TXO launched a Carbon Calculator that customers can use to quantify the carbon savings from buying and reselling refurbished network equipment.
The theory behind the calculator is simple. “Basically, it’s the newly manufactured emissions of a product minus the TXO emissions of getting that product to our customers refurbished,” Evans explained. “That difference is the carbon saved.”
TXO’s Carbon Calculator takes into account variables like the equipment lifespan, the time it takes to repair that equipment, the carbon footprint associated with transporting it to the operator, etc. “Everything that touches a product,” she said.
There isn’t much of a lifespan difference between new and refurbished equipment, either, Evans added, as refurbished parts often come from a newly upgraded network.
“A lot of stuff doesn’t need to be repaired,” she said. “It just needs a good clean half the time because it’s sometimes sat outdoors for years.”