The Leading Practices of Green Mobile Telecommunication Base Station Design

1. Introduction

Mobile telecommunication base stations have been a crucial telecommunication technology spread everywhere as a result of wider use of mobile phone communication. The telecommunication industry consumes a large amount of energy as reported by some telecommunication social responsibility reports, further some operators are listed as the largest energy consumption in their countries, as more and more industries introduces more ICT the situation will get worse. More local and international pressure on the telecommunication operators and equipment vendors will increase in the future (Huawei 2011), accordingly, the developers of base stations have concerned about the green initiatives; the CO2 emissions over the product life cycle are traced and different actions have been made (Lu 2008; Jianguo et al., 2008). One of these important actions made is the green design of base stations; system developers have made a lot of actions to reduce the energy consumptions, improve the using of green energy and reduce the need air conditioning of base stations. The concern about the green design of base stations is reasonable since the energy consumption of radio sites usually accounts for more than 75% of the energy consumed during the telecommunication process (Huawei 2011).

The majority of green product design previous studies have concerned about the process of green product development instead of reporting the attributes and actions (e.g. Wimmer et al., 2008; Bard et al., 2011; Lamore 2011; Cagno and Trucco 2013), further, the studies of green supply chain management practices have not reported in-depth the relationship between design attributes and between design attributes and actions (e.g. Zhu et al., 2005; Zhu et al., 2010; Green et al., 2012; Perotti et al., 2012; Shi, et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012), accordingly, this study decided to report in –depth the green mobile telecommunication base stations design attributes and actions, to realize this aim the following objectives were realized.

• 1.

  Identifying the base stations design attributes.

• 2.

  Identifying the relationship between the base station design attributes.

• 3.

  Identifying the green design actions are made to realize the base station design attributes.

This paper is organized as follows; the second section discuss the literature and represents the research contributions, the third section represents and discusses the research methodology, the next section is data analysis and findings, the fifth section is the discussion and the last section is the conclusions applications and future researches.

2. Literature Review

The concept of design for environment is a new concept, according to this concept the product has not a negative impact on the ecological environment, whether the product is used by customers or when the product is used and disposed, according to this concept, the product could be made from ecological components, which are disposed in the ecological environment without negative consequences, or the hazardous materials are eliminated from the product, or the product is easy to disassembly for recycled or remanufactured, the product size and weight could be reduced; further, the product consumes less energy during usage, or the product emission less greenhouse gases (Zhu et al., 2005; Zhu et al., 2010; Green Jr. et al., 2012; Perotti et al., 2012; Shi et al., 2012; Lee et al., 2012), design for environment is a critical success factor in a green supply chain management strategy and can help firms realize economic benefits (Shi et al., 2012).