Europe’s largest telecom operators are moving refurbishment from their sustainability reports into their purchasing decisions. As spending on 5G and fibre continues, groups including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone are relying more on repaired, refurbished and reused equipment. That covers both their own network hardware and the routers and set-top boxes they supply to customers.

The numbers are large. Deutsche Telekom reports about 2.45 million refurbished fixed-network devices and more than 224,000 refurbished mobile devices in its latest circular economy report. In 2025 it also launched an internal equipment exchange so its businesses can pass spare hardware between them. Telefónica says it has reused more than 780,000 pieces of network equipment, and that three-quarters of the electronics it collects are reused rather than recycled. Orange Wholesale aims to source 10% of its eligible capital spending from refurbished equipment in 2026, partly because network equipment accounts for almost a third of its supply-chain (Scope 3) emissions.

The picture is uneven. Vodafone’s latest annual report shows network e-waste rising to about 7,700 tonnes, of which only around 1% was reused, mainly because more old equipment is being taken out of service. The operator plans to expand repair and reuse with the help of an EU logistics hub. In the UK, Virgin Media O2’s long-running partnership with refurbisher TXO says it has avoided more than 5,200 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions over ten years, most of it by refurbishing recovered equipment.

The article also points out that the financial case is not yet proven. Operators tend to report volumes and avoided emissions rather than audited savings, and the figures cover very different categories of equipment. Refurbishment only pays when the full cost of testing, transport, maintenance and vendor support stays below the cost of buying new. Even so, the direction is clear: for European telecom companies, a device’s second life is becoming part of how they plan and buy equipment.