Sustainability

Practicing what you preach: Connect to Protect

By Mike on 22 July 2008

INTERNATIONAL – Earlier this month James wrote an interesting piece on how Nokia’s wider recycling values are being applied internally. Continuing this thread, this week I was pointed in the direction of a smart internal website at Nokia that builds on this ethos. Simply called Connect to Protect, Nokia has set up a dedicated site that’s essentially a one-stop resource for environmental issues relating not only to Nokia as a business, but also to employees’ private lives.

The site has been built in co-operation with the WWF, and is packed with content ranging from key info on broader environmental issues such as climate change, sustainability and endangered species, down to day-to-day articles including top tips for more environmentally sound living and even the environmental impact of our eating habits. From a personal perspective, it doesn’t feel self indulgent or laboured (as is the danger with this sort of thing), as the content is clearly there as a dip-in-dip-out resource, and help inform personal decisions as well as reinforce Nokia’s general environmental values.

These sorts of internal initiatives are continuing to grow within Nokia, and more importantly they’re beginning to engage on a personal level, with more and more employees taking part and using these resources.

What do you think to this sort of approach? And what about where you work – is the environment on the agenda? Let us know in the comments section below.

Share and Enjoy:

Post a comment

Sven Koerber Says:
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:04 pm

When it comes to “Green IT”, many corporations aim at selling more energy-efficient devices (c.f. the new Evolve charger) or promoting recycling. Which is good, but not good enough, since a large part of the environmental footprint comes from putting the devices into the world in the first place.

I really like Nokia’s awareness campaign for more recycling, though that’s sub-optimal if recycling means downcycling materials, e.g. park benches from old handset shells. A sustainable development model would be aimed at creating new handsets from old handsets (following the “cradle to cradle” philosophy as outlined in William McDonough’s book of the same name). That’s easy to demand and hard to to do.

What would really impress me would be a bold step towards cradle-to-cradle handset design and manufacturing (plus energy-efficient Ovi services in the cloud), with Nokia using their leverage and green motivation to manage the flow of materials of billions of such handsets around the world.