Sustainable product design program: A view from our Terminals team

Hervé Obert

July 31, 2023

The eco-design "MakCCIng Durable” program transformed the way the ALE team designs terminals.

Eco-design is not only about meeting compliance requirements but also about embracing the business opportunity to deliver technology for good, in other words, solutions that help our customers meet their own sustainability goals and have a less negative impact on the planet.

Eco-design is complex. We often think about recycled materials, energy savings, and focus on carbon footprint. These topics are important, but there are many other parameters that must be considered when you do a full life cycle analysis (LCA).

To follow this path, Hervé Obert and Jean-Paul Poncet, from ALE Terminals Communications Business Division, participated for a year, in an eco-design program called "MakCCIng Durable», launched by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in the East of France.

With the new range of phones, the team wanted to go further in ensuring ALE solutions are sustainable and greener and learning from experts by participating in the "MakCCIng Durable" program did exactly that.

“We developed an eco-design approach for a product known as a DECT access point, which receives radio signals emitted by mobile phones and is transferred over wired links. We have developed our product so that it is powered by the network cable, which has enabled us to remove the power supply accessory that we supplied on the previous product. This has enabled us to divide the volume of product transported by 6.” says Jean-Paul Poncet, Wireless Phones Product Manager.

The electronic and mechanical parts of the product were also redesigned, which enabled a reduction of the weight of the base from 173 g to 109 g, so the total weight of the transported product was cut by 71%.

The sustainable-making program will help ALE create better-designed products, as all ALE products on the market are reviewed from the sustainability design point of view.

“We're also going to set up programs to recover and re-commission these products so that they can be reused, and in this way, we're going to further reduce our environmental impact,” says Emmanuel Pellegrini, Terminals Department Director, at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

Discover the objective and the results achieved in the video below: