Employee Spotlight: Sandra Klackenborn, Head of Sustainability

“Sustainability starts with motivating organizational change at the individual level.”

In light of Earth Day 2024, we’re highlighting Sandra Klackenborn, our new Head of Sustainability, whom we hired last month. Telecommunications faces a critical juncture as network operators work to reduce emissions and meet recently established sustainability goals. However, sustainable networking encompasses myriad focus areas, necessitating organizational cooperation to reduce telecom’s environmental impact.

Q: Can you tell us about your background?

I have an academic background in organizational psychology and have dedicated myself to sustainability initiatives for ten years. I’ve worked nearly exclusively in Information Communication Technology (ICT) and previously worked for Telia Company as a Sustainability, Ethics and Compliance Officer. My academic background informs my strategies for applying psychology within organizations to motivate behavioral and procedural changes that facilitate sustainability goals.

Q: What does Arelion’s culture look like on the inside?

Arelion’s culture is unique, particularly for a global Internet carrier. Our teams take genuine pride in enabling global connectivity and helping customers by focusing on total transparency. Global networks are essential for enabling technological innovation and equal access to information, and that’s reflected in my coworkers’ levels of expertise and care. Everyone here is a specialist in their field. They’re always available to improve your technological understanding through their deep knowledge. As a technology geek, Arelion’s open culture teaches me something new every day about network connections, Points-of-Presence, subsea cables and other areas of genuine interest to me.

Q: What is your day-to-day experience?

Since I started at Arelion, I’ve felt fortunate that our owners prioritize sustainability and empower us with resources to improve our strategy. Network sustainability is a vast focus area, encompassing every part of an operator’s business model and operations. This means I get to collaborate with multiple departments to achieve a common goal. Whether working with networking specialists to understand how new technologies improve energy efficiency or working with operations managers to improve Arelion’s business travel and office waste protocols, every day presents a new learning opportunity. This daily company-wide collaboration keeps my work engaging.

Q: What are Arelion’s sustainability goals? How will you achieve those goals?

Arelion defined its sustainability goals last year, including reaching Net Zero emissions by 2040, reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by over 50 percent by 2030, ensuring 100 percent of our removed networking equipment is reused, resold or recycled, and ensuring 100 percent of our suppliers align with our sustainability goals. But this is just the beginning of our journey, particularly since telecom sustainability is challenging to measure. Aside from lifecycle management of decommissioned equipment, responsible power sourcing and maximizing energy efficiency through network automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides an opportunity to accurately measure our carbon footprint through advanced analytics.

Global networks encompass many industries, making telecom sustainability feel like a tangled web of network operators, power and equipment suppliers, data center providers and other companies. This complexity means we must take small achievable steps as well. After all, sustainability starts with motivating organizational change at the individual level. This is why raising internal awareness and aligning our employees is also a current focus. I’m grateful that Arelion’s employees are extremely enthusiastic about these goals.

Q: Anything else?

Sustainability creates a ripple effect, particularly as an Internet carrier enabling positive global developments through digitalization. Technological innovation’s possibilities are endless, but we must balance innovation with reducing networking’s environmental impact at every level. As a result, it’s critical to align employees internally and inspire change individually if we want to inspire change organizationally. No matter the size, every action is another step toward minimizing telecom’s environmental impact to benefit the people who rely on our network every day.