Sustainability - environment

Environment and technology

Tech drives all our climate actions and helps us work towards a healthier, more sustainable environment for everyone.

Recycling

REUSED OR RECYCLED

632,919 mobiles, modems and other devices

  • 378,786 devices went into our eCycle program
  • 254,133 of your devices became repurposed tech   

In the 2023 financial year.

Our packaging is made from renewable or recycled material

IMPROVING PACKAGING

Our innovative packaging design won 11 awards

Today, 100% of Telstra-branded packaging features renewable or recycled material and is fully recyclable. Our awards include one from APCO (Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation). 

SERVING UP HEALTHY FOOD

124,747 meals for vulnerable Aussies

Working with social enterprise, PonyUp for Good, we recycled 9,252 kilos of old tech and 1,367 Telstra office and field uniforms. This helped food rescue organisation, SecondBite serve 100,000 meals to people doing it tough. 

REDUCING WASTE

Smarter accessory packaging design

Originally made of 11 components, weighing around 50g and non-recyclable, our accessories packaging now comprises an average of just 2 components, weighing around 11g and is 100% kerbside recyclable.

SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS

Smart Modem 3 casing contains 95% recycled plastic

We applied eco-design thinking when developing the Telstra Smart Modem 3, removing the need for plastic accessories, increasing recycled plastic in the casing to 95% and creating 100% recyclable packaging.

Reducing emissions

By 2030, we aim to halve our absolute emissions.

To date, we've reduced our combined scope 1 and 2 emissions by 30% and our scope 3 emissions by 28%.

  • Scope 1 emissions come from the fuel running our vehicles and generators
  • Scope 2 emissions come from the electricity used in our networks, offices & stores
  • Scope 3 emissions come from our value chain, including the products and services we purchase and the power it takes for our customers to run the devices we supply.

Our reduction targets include a long term commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2050, aligned to the Paris Agreement. Our target to reduce absolute scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions by at least 50% by 2030 is from a 2019 financial year baseline.

EMISSIONS TARGETS PROGRESS

Scope 3 emissions down by 28%

We work closely with our suppliers and partners to reduce carbon emissions across our products and services. 

From a 2019 financial year baseline.

CLIMATE CHANGE INDEX

Awarded an 'A' rating

We're amongst the top 2% of companies globally in the CDP Global Climate Change Index 2022, being awarded an 'A' rating. 

REDUCING EMISSIONS

130,743 megawatt hours saved

Upgrading amenities, replacing LED lights and decommissioning legacy networks has saved almost 130,743MWh or 102,891 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent on an annualised basis.

In the 2023 financial year.

Carbon offsets

Our overarching commitment to address climate change is first by reducing emissions, however the impacts of climate change continue to increase each year.

As we’re working to reduce emissions, we’ve committed to investing in carbon projects that avoid or reduce emissions. We purchase carbon credits from these projects - equivalent to the remaining emissions of our business each year.

A telco's responsibility

We’re working to reduce our emissions and while we’re on this journey, we’re committed to offsetting the remaining emissions of our organisation with carbon credits.

We apply a rigorous due diligence process to purchase carbon credits from international and domestic projects and have also created our first carbon farm to restore native forest and remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Trees and technology

PLANTING TREES TO REMOVE CARBON

Project Acre: a reforestation technology trial

Welcome to our carbon farm, where we're planting 158,000 native trees and shrubs across 240ha of land. This will remove and store 160,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over the next 25 years. Our project also features drone planting and maggot fertiliser.

Renewable energy

Helping decarbonise our electricity grid

We've reached 30% of our renewable energy target, which is to enable renewable energy generation that's equivalent to 100% of our consumption by 2025. In other words, we're supporting projects that put more renewable energy into the national electricity grid, so there's more to go around. 

INVESTING IN RENEWABLES

Supporting over $1B in renewable energy projects

Renewable energy has environmental and economic benefits. We've signed four power purchase agreements to date, including one with Australia's largest wind farm. These are just some of the ways we're helping to decarbonise Australia. 

Our vision for tackling climate change

Watch video: Telstra + Vision 2045 initiative

Vision 2045 proudly supports the UN and its objectives. Telstra was invited to take part in this groundbreaking documentary series to show how we're harnessing technology to accelerate climate change action.

Footage: Dark sky with lightning strikes accompanied by intense, urgent music. Screen changes to a devastating bushfire burning along a coastline, then a flooded town, then a coral reef, then a dry, barren landscape.

Audio - Vicki Brady: Australia's feeling the effects of climate change more than any other developed country in the world and we're seeing it first hand, whether it's extreme heat to bushfires more intense than we've ever seen before, to floods and the rainfall.

Importantly, here in Australia, we have some world leading technology at our disposal. I think we've got a really important part to play into the insights and what we do to really change the world to be able to address climate change. 

Cut to Telstra CEO, Vicki Brady speaking to camera with accompanying text: "Vicki Brady CEO, Telstra". 

Cut to title card of video: "Vision 2045". 

Audio - Vicki: Telstra is Australia's largest telecommunications company and very proudly, we've been serving Australians for more than a hundred years. So, we connect Australia coast to coast - east to west.

That's a bit over 4,000 kilometres and our networks reach about 99 percent of the population. We connect Australia and that takes a lot of power. In fact, we're the 13th largest scope 2 emitter in the country. 

So, in terms of the role we play in reducing our own carbon footprint as a company, some examples of that: firstly, we've invested about a billion dollars supporting renewable energy projects here in the country, and that includes most recently, signing a power purchase agreement with the largest wind farm in southeast Queensland.

Secondly, we're focused on reducing our own emissions and that's through things like looking at our air conditioning, looking at our consumption of power at our various sites, and then I think most importantly, the role we can play, helping enable our customers. How do they reduce their emissions? We can play an important role in the transition to a low carbon future. 

Footage as Vicki speaks: Montage of iconic Australian locations - Sydney Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge, cars travelling along a red, outback road and a beautiful beach. Also, a windfarm at sunset, shown from different angles and sweeping across an outback landscape and telecommunications tower, then a mountain at sunrise.  

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "David Burns - Group Executive, Enterprise, Telstra".

Audio - David: Telstra as a Telco exists in over 20 countries around the world. So we have an opportunity with our products and services to make a real impact to emissions. In Australia, we have an ambition to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030 against the 2005 baseline. Deloitte found that we can help our customers avoid seven times our own emissions by 2030. That’s the equivalent of avoiding 4.3 million tonnes of emissions per year, or the equivalent - which gets me super excited - of 1.3 million cars off Australia's roads.

So, by using technology, products and offerings, we think we can help those customers make a real impact. Let me use a few examples, in particular, in our digital technologies.

Cloud computing. It's incredibly more efficient than on-premise computing. In fact, cloud computing can reduce up to 80 percent of emissions versus on-premise computing.

IOT. We're applying it to mines, factories and utilities to create efficiencies to track their resources, track their operations and make a real impact to how they're executed.

Farming. Again, we're tracking resources and their operations including down to the animals themselves in those instances to help that be a more efficient operations and reduce emissions.

Telematics. We're using it in the transport industry to help maintenance and driver efficiency. We're applying that to some of the world's largest business problems. An example of this is we've partnered with Farmbot, an Australian agri-tech business. They specialise in monitoring of water-based assets. That helps farmers manage their assets remotely, such as pipes, dams, troughs, etcetera. It makes them more efficient; they don't need to visit those sites as often as they used to. We send real-time alerts to their phone or tablet or other device and enable them to manage these assets and manage their farms more efficiently, with less travel and less commuting across their properties. 

It's these sorts of technologies where we're partnering as a telecommunications and technology provider to help farmers in Australia reduce their emissions. 

Footage as David speaks: Montage of factories emitting smoke, gridlocked cars on a freeway, digital technology cloud screen, giant computer servers and mining in quarry. We also see farmers using tech in a field, cows in a paddock, roads and overpasses, trucks travelling along a highway, a blue cloudy sky, a farmer tending to his water troughs, the same farmer looking at the real-time alerts on his mobile phone and a different farmer with the Farmbot device. We end with an aerial shot of a sprawling cattle farm. 

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "Lyndall Stoyles - Group General Manager Sustainability - External and Legal, Telstra".

Audio - Lyndall: The carbon farm is essentially an experiment. And it's an experiment where we trial different technologies and we do that to see if we can create ways to remove carbon from the atmosphere, store carbon from the atmosphere, but also reforest land and create carbon offsets in the process. 

We plan to plant around one hundred and sixty thousand native trees and that should allow us to store around one hundred and sixty thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide over the 25 years of the project. 

Footage as Lyndall speaks: Farmer standing on green hillside and sweeping images of lush green countryside. 

Cut to new person, speaking directly to camera with accompanying text: "Ben Burge - Member of the team, Telstra".  

Audio - Ben: A hundred and fifty years ago, this place on the New South Wales tablelands was a forest. It was heavily cleared to become a sheep station and in 2022, Telstra bought the farm with a plan to return it to a permanent forest state.

Instead of allowing food waste to go into landfill, where it rots and creates methane, we teamed up with a company called Barty, who processes that food waste by allowing maggots to feast upon it so it creates an insect-based food source but also a probiotic fertiliser. We take that maggot faeces product and create a seed bomb. That seed pod gets delivered by a targeted drone delivery system. It's an automated method of planting a forest. It's been great working with Air Seed on this project. We've got a lot of hilly regions, rocky regions where conventional planting is not viable and so an automated method of dropping seed bombs from the sky was particularly suited to this initiative. We see an increasing role for technology in planting, weeding, monitoring and verification.  

Apart from getting hotter, Australia's been ravaged by the loss of biodiversity. Projects like this establish biodiversity corridors for the protection of native fauna like wallaroos and wallabies. This project is an example of the nature-based solutions that will be a critical part of the global solution to climate change.  

Footage as Ben speaks: green farm with tin sheds, men walking through grassy hills, maggots feeding on food waste, hand with soil running through its fingers, seed bombs being dopped into Air Seed drone, drone dropping the pods over fields and montage of images across fields at sunset. We also see scenes of koalas in trees, kangaroos in paddocks and wallaroos and wallabies. 

Audio - Lyndall speaks again: Australia is a country of really vast and beautiful places and a country that has many valuable natural assets in it. Our actions and the way we've managed the country has led to really quite dramatic habitat loss and species loss to the point where some of our iconic species are now becoming extinct. 

Our Telstra Foundation has partnered with a  number of different organisations. One of the more recent projects we've engaged with is with the leading Australian science agency, CSRIO, and a First Nations agency, NAILSMA - the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance.

One of the programs is the healthy country AI  program and we've co designed the program that trains local Indigenous rangers and trains them to use drones and other technology to manage the land, including monitoring the way in which feral animals can destroy local waterholes. These programs are really exciting. They're exciting because they take ancient, ancient knowledge continuing to this day and combine it with modern day science and technology to find solutions to really tackle this challenge of habitat and species loss. And doing so in some of the most remote parts of the world. 

Footage as we cut back to Lyndall speaking: outback landscape, native cockatoos and bilbies, koalas in trees, men on quad bikes in bush, Indigenous rangers inspecting land and using drones, helicopter landing and more remote outback locations. 

Audio - Vicki speaks again: At Telstra, our purpose is all about creating a connected future where everyone can thrive. And I truly believe, for us to face into climate change and solve it, technology's going to play an incredibly important part.

So, our role in that, it is absolutely using our voice to advocate for change. It's absolutely in the actions we're taking directly to reduce the impact we're having on the environment.

I think when you bring the power of technology together with the will to want to change the world, we can absolutely look forward to a much brighter and more sustainable future.

Footage as we cut back to Vicki speaking: windfarms at sunset, Dad walking toddler though leafy park, stars in night sky. 

Video transitions to black screen as "Vision 2045" logo appears again. 

Bigger Picture 2023 Sustainability Report, cover

report

Bigger Picture Sustainability Report

Where we're making the biggest impacts. 

Enabling Climate Action Report, cover

report

Enabling Positive Climate Action

How we've helped businesses reduce emissions with tech. 

Keep your eye on the environment

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