Environmentally friendly products and services: an overview of the entire life cycle

How can we make our products more sustainable – and help minimize negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycle? And what products and services can we use to achieve a positive environmental impact? These questions occupy us continuously. The focus is on resource conservation, energy efficiency and emission reduction.

We also deal with this topic in detail in our Sustainability Statement 2024.

Milestones achieved, ongoing projects and goals

For a decade, we have been analyzing the environmental impact of our product portfolio. In this way, we identify the levers to make our products and services more sustainable. With our measures, we start with the development.

Sustainability starts with product design

We want to offer our customers more and more products and services that have ecological or social benefits. We start with product development and look at the effects throughout the entire life cycle. Our product developers follow our “Sustainability by Design Guidelines”. In this way, we provide them with concrete guidelines, for example on aspects such as “Sustainable Packaging”, “Hazardous Ingredients” and “Sustainable Device Development”. We are also working with various partners to make the increasing use of streaming services more energy-efficient. In the reporting year, we therefore published a guide to help decision-makers, development teams and consumers assess the energy needs of video streaming and promote more sustainable criteria.

Our principles for more sustainable AI development

Applications based on artificial intelligence (AI) have a particularly high energy and resource requirement. To promote the resource- and energy-efficient development and use of AI, we introduced nine principles for “green AI” in 2024. In doing so, we not only want to make the development and use of AI within Deutsche Telekom more sustainable, but also provide impetus in the ICT industry. Our principles for green AI, for example, stipulate that AI models should be used multiple times and that programs should be written in a resource-saving manner. Because AI – used responsibly – also makes a positive contribution to climate protection: For example, we use AI in our data centers and networks to increase energy efficiency.

Ecologically sustainable products clearly labelled

The basis of our solutions is Deutsche Telekom’s “green network”, which has been operated 100 % with electricity from renewable energies throughout the Group since 2021. In addition, we offer hardware, services and digital solutions that offer an environmental advantage.

We determine what these are using an IT-supported impact measurement process. The process and methodology were validated by TÜV Rheinland in 2023 and confirmed in 2024. Detailed information on this can be found here in the CR report under Impact Measurement.

If our analyses show that a product or service has a significant positive ecological impact, we award it with our #GreenMagenta label. Here are some recent examples of our solutions that have received the #GreenMagenta label in 2024:

• T Phone: in 2024, we released the new T Phone 2 and T Phone 2 Pro devices (REVVL 7 5G and REVVL 7 Pro 5G in the USA). They are produced with less emissions than the previous models and their packaging is characterized by increased recyclability.
• Magenta TV Stick: the housing of the Magenta TV Stick is now made of 95 % recycled material from electronics and household appliances.
• Halfsize SIM cards: in Austria and Germany, there are half-size SIM cards made of recycled plastic. Due to the more compact design, we reduce the use of materials. Switching to recycled plastic saves up to 900 kg of CO₂e per 100,000 SIM cards.
• Take-back process: we take back and refurbish used equipment in many countries – in Germany, Croatia and North Macedonia, this take-back process carries our #GreenMagenta label.
• Business customer solutions: more than 20 of our solutions for business customers are also marked with the #GreenMagenta label, e.g. IntraSelect SD-WAN for energy-efficient network management or our Purchase portal for mobile phones, smartphones and tablets.

You can find an overview of all our products with the #GreenMagenta label on our website.

IT solutions for environmental protection

Our portfolio includes solutions for information and communication technology (ICT) that can contribute to the reduction of environmental pollution and thus also to the preservation of biodiversity.

As the groundwater level is falling in large parts of Europe, endangering habitats for many creatures, countermeasures are becoming increasingly urgent. T‑Systems offers a solution for digital water management. The meters transmit water data automatically – thanks to Internet of Things (IOT) technology. The intelligently controlled water withdrawal helps to monitor and protect groundwater levels.

Another concern is the protection of bees: we have developed hives with smart sensors that can be monitored remotely and collect and transmit data such as temperature, humidity and sounds. This allows bee colonies to be cared for in a very targeted manner and unnecessary, disturbing trips to the insects to be avoided.

X-Creation – Driving Innovation and Business Value Through Collaboration

To enhance the sustainability of our products and services, we actively engage in collaborative innovation initiatives, such as T‑Systems’ X-Creation program. In 2024, approximately 1,000 partners, customers, and experts from over 140 partner organizations and Deutsche Telekom joined forces to drive impactful innovation.

X-Creation is a curated thriving innovation community where members collaborate to accelerate the development of solutions with meaningful societal and environmental impact. Following its initial success in 2024 – an AI-powered app to combat disinformation on social media – X-Creation focused on advancing further products and services that contribute to sustainability and social progress throughout the reporting year.

The format successfully developed and delivered more than 18 solutions, addressing key challenges in misinformation & disinformation, economic uncertainty, extreme weather events, interstate armed conflicts and social polarization. Additionally, two start-ups promoting environmentally friendly technologies were founded, and the UNFCCC Secretariat (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) became an official partner of the program.

We are continuing X-Creation 2025 and want to continue to promote sustainable transformation – through innovation and collaboration.

Measuring progress on more sustainable products

We use various key figures to measure our progress in expanding our more sustainable product portfolio. For example, we record the number of sustainable and refurbished mobile and fixed-line devices.

We also calculate the ratio of the number of more sustainable products to the total number of devices sold and rented: in 2024, this share was more than 73 % of our fixed-network devices sold and rented across the Group (excluding T‑Mobile US). In addition, we collect key figures on the take-back of equipment for recycling purposes and on sustainably packaged products (see Circular economy).

Enablement factor: how much CO₂ can our customers save?

ICT solutions can help our customers reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, video conferencing can save on commuting to work and business trips. Every year, we calculate the climate protection impact of our solutions on the customer side. To this end, we have been determining the enablement factor since 2014, which compares the CO₂ savings potential of our customers to Deutsche Telekom’s CO₂ footprint (Scope 1 to 3).

In 2024, we calculated an enablement factor of 4.41 for Germany. This means that customers were able to save more than four times as much CO₂ when using our solutions in the reporting year as Deutsche Telekom itself consumed this year. So if we emitted one ton of CO₂ in Germany, we were able to save up to 4.41 tons of CO₂ by using our products and solutions.

A large part of the savings for our customers in Germany comes from:

• Home office and our web and video conferencing solutions,
• Cloud Computing, as well as
• more powerful servers, more energy-efficient data centers, and higher infrastructure utilization.

For even more transparency and comparability, we are supporting the European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC) in developing an industry standard for calculating emission savings from ICT products.

ESG KPI “Enablement Factor” ^a DT Group in Germany

The positive CO₂ effects made possible by the use of our products and solutions on the customer side amounted to a total of 17.38 million tonnes in Germany in the reporting year. This equates to an enablement factor of 4.41. Even though the positive CO₂ effects have thus increased compared to the previous year, the enablement factor has fallen slightly. This is due to the fact that our Scope 3 emissions in Germany increased in the reporting year. ^b

Enablement factor

DT Group in Germany, 2024

Enablement factor from 2021 to 2024

Extract: positive CO₂ effects facilitated for our customers

in kt CO₂e

Involving suppliers in climate protection

We involve our suppliers intensively in climate protection. The “Supplier Engagement Rating” of the non-profit organization CDP evaluates companies according to how actively they work with their suppliers on climate protection. In 2024, CDP once again included us in the “Climate Leader A List” and on the “Supplier Engagement Leader Board”. This was helped by the fact that we calculated supplier-specific emission intensities based on the responses of our suppliers in the CDP Supply Chain Program: to do this, we compared the total emissions of suppliers to their sales. The ESG KPI “CDP Supply Chain Program” shows how much of our purchasing volume from emission-intensive suppliers is covered by the CDP Supply Chain Program. In 2024, this was around 46 %.

CDP Supply Chain Programm

Looking ahead

For 10 years, we have been systematically analyzing the sustainability of our product portfolio. In 2025, our focus will be on further developing our key performance indicator systems for the circular economy and product-related greenhouse gas emissions, thus making our progress even more measurable and controllable. Providing impetus for more sustainable AI development also plays an important role for us.