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Ramboll Telecom has made a comparative evaluation of the carbon footprint for a range of different towers. A carbon footprint is the total emission of green house gasses (GHG) for a product or an organization including both direct and indirect emissions. The carbon footprints include the whole life cycle “cradle to grave” of the products from excavating the raw resources to production, use and disposal. The approach used is the life cycle assessment (LCA) method and data is collected from approved LCA tools and databases.
The scope of the assessment is the life cycle of a telecom tower from extraction of raw materials to production, transportation, mantling and dismantling. In our report we have used a scenario for Africa which is a new and big market in the telecom sector with many towers needed monthly. Most of the towers for the African market are nowadays produced in India or China. For our scenario we have chosen a factory in India for delivery of a tower in Ghana. After manufacturing of the tower including galvanization the tower will be loaded into a container and then loaded on a truck and transported to the nearest harbor. From here the container will be transported to the port in Ghana where the tower will be unloaded and placed in a warehouse.
The results show that the consumption of steel for both base and tower is the most single important parameter for the overall footprint for the telecom towers assessed in this study. Assembly, welding and transportation is of insignificant importance. However, also the consumption of concrete and armoring of the foundation is of some importance. Surprisingly transportation even over larger distances is not affecting the overall emissions with more than 0.5 %. Similar contribution has the mounting of the tower. | 
