Sky's sustainable product journey video

Transcript

At Sky we believe we have the best products in the business. Products that entertain us. That connect us. That enrich the lives of 11 and a half million customers.

And when you’re making the best products in the business, you have a responsibility to consider not only what it will cost the company and the customer, but what it will cost the earth.

This thinking has sparked some of the most innovative changes our people have made across the whole product journey, from their conception, to their use, to their end of life.

 Roger Lambert, Director of Customer Technology:

We set about building a team from some of the best people from Europe. But they haven’t all come from a consumer electronic environment; we work to bring more diverse ideas.

We have tried to recruit engineers that are pretty passionate about being the best, passionate about let’s make it sustainable, let’s do it properly, let’s design it well.

This is where having your own internal design house and your own engineering team really comes to play.

Fiona Ball, Head of Responsible Business:

Sky’s quite different in respect to how the team works. These are the guys who actually make the products, they’re allowed to take risks and they’re much more empowered.

Roger Lambert, Director of Customer Technology:

We have full control, right from choosing the component through to the delivery to the customer and then collecting it at the end and recycling it.

Steve Walker, UTL Manager, Reverse Logistics Partner:

I joined the contract in 2008.

Sky is a great client to work for because they’re vision is all around empowering your people to make changes.

I was down at Sky talking to product developers. I know about recycling, they know about product design. Together we’ll come up with a better design.

Roger Lambert, Director of Customer Technology:

Small changes can make big impacts. We looked at every component individually.

Will that save a tiny amount of power? Yes. Each individual one didn’t amount to much but times by 150 different components, times by a million customers – that’s quite a lot of power.

When we think that’s hard to beat, we managed to put WiFi in it. Not only will that enhance our customer experience, but we no longer had to ship a separate device.

So every time we think we’ve got something really great, we then think of something we can do to make it even better.

Fiona Ball, Head of Responsible Business:

So one example is saving a small amount of energy by switching off the set top box to auto standby.

Across 11 million customers, that has a big impact. In fact it has more of an impact than we have as an organisation ourselves.

Our carbon footprint is 90,000 tonnes of CO2. By implementing auto standby, we’ve saved the equivalent of 200,000 tonnes of CO2.

Bill Nesbitt, Logistics Manager:

So the project I’m most proud of is a project called Doorstep Exchange. We have an opportunity at the point of the courier visit to talk to the customer about any products they may want to send back to us and therefore contribute to a reduction in the overall new product that we need to use.

Steve Walker, UTL Manager, Reverse Logistics Partner:

By 2010 we became landfill free. You could say “enough is enough, we’re 100% - stop there, don’t do anything else”. But Sky’s enthusiasm for this sort of thing has been probably the most rewarding – 100% is only halfway there.

Do I sound like I’m bragging? Good!

Fiona Ball, Head of Responsible Business:

At Sky we have an opportunity to do business the right way, to reduce the environmental or social impacts of the product itself.

For us being a responsible business is how we should do business, how we are expected to do business, and it’s how we want to do business.