An update on Sky’s Sustainable Product Journey

At Sky, we’ve been on a journey for the last four years, challenging ourselves to make better, more sustainable products every step of the way. Sky’s drive for continuous innovation means a lot has been achieved by the business since we started. 

Last week we released our first interactive factsheet about the environmental credentials of our Sky+HD Box. It’s a real step forward in making it easy for people to see how committed we are to ensuring our products are the best possible for our customers and the environment too. And a good moment to reflect on where we’ve come from.

In 2011, we started using life cycle assessments to inform our sustainable product thinking, because decisions made in the design phase have a huge knock on effect on every other stage of the product’s life. As a result, our products design team now use our own Sustainable Design Toolkit when designing all new products.

Since its launch, we have continued to drive innovation within the Sky±HD box. Iterative design changes and regular software upgrades have improved energy consumption, reduced material use and extended the life of the product. A recent important software update we made was to extend the eco-mode setting by 50%.  This automatically puts a customer’s Sky+ HD box to a low energy mode between 2.45 and 5.45am. It also saves customers an extra £4m a year, on top of the £21.5m saving resulting from the introduction of auto standby. 

We’re continuing to take a leadership role, sharing what we’ve learned with our industry. As founders and Chair of the European Voluntary Agreement to improve the energy efficiency of Pay Television (Complex) Set-Top Boxes, we work to raise the standards for the whole industry. Also this year, we initiated the development of a new standard (IEEE 1680.6) to drive best practice in the eco-design of Pay TV Set-Top Boxes. We are chairing the working group of over thirty members who are developing this worldwide standard.

Our efforts to be leaders in responsible business have not gone unnoticed. In July, we won the ‘Best Business Partnership Award’ at the National Recycling Awards for our work with logistics provider UTL in ensuring we reuse or recycle 100% of our products returned to us – a fantastic collaborative achievement. In the same month, we were ‘Highly Commended’ in the ‘Sustainable Products and Services Award’ category by Business in the Community. Earlier, our 2TB Sky+HD box with built-in wi-fi also won the ‘What Hi-Fi Product of the Year Award’, testament to the work of our product design teams who reduced its environmental footprint and created a great experience for our customers.

We hope this has given you a good insight into the work we do here at Sky to improve the environmental sustainability of our products year on year.

 You can read more here or watch our video.

You can also follow @SkyBiggerPic to get our latest updates.