Virgin Media O2 – Circular economy as a key pillar of its Better Connections Plan

The Better Connections plan is Virgin Media O2’s ESG strategy which covers four key pillars including the circular economy.  

Virgin Media O2 committed to supporting consumers to carry out 10 million circular actions by the end of 2025, to help tackle e-waste. This includes sending back old kit, sustainably recycling devices, donating smartphones to people and growing demand for refurbished devices.  

The company also committed to achieve zero waste products and services within its own business operations, with these goals: 1) Achieve zero waste operations and products by 2025; 2) Recycle 95% of operational waste with less than 5% going to incineration; and 3) Reuse or recycle 100% of all returned customer and network equipment. The company’s latest progress is included in its Sustainability Performance Update 2023.  

Virgin Media O2 plays an important role in promoting circular actions to its customers. This public commitment to targets is useful to gain support from internal teams to promote solutions. Finally, having a specific circular economy workstream and targets allowed the company to appoint a Circular Economy Manager to Virgin Media O2’s sustainability team which works to embed circularity into our business and our propositions.