Sustainable & Connected Future

In addition to bringing more convenience and energy efficiency, the future will be more sustainable. While governments around the world develop energy-related regulations and incentives such as the European Union’s goal to be climate neutral by 2050, a desire for energy savings and a growing sense of environmental responsibility drive consumer smart home adoption.   From refrigerators to stoves, washing machines and lawn tools…consumers are looking for new appliances to reduce energy usage and consumption as a means to make households greener and more sustainable.

At TE Connectivity (TE), our highly engineered products are enabling a more sustainable world including solutions for health, safety and efficiency in appliances and smart homes. The materials to manufacture TE connectors play an important role in its sustainability characteristics. Based on TE Connectivity’s 2023 Industrial Technology Index (ITI), approximately 70-90% of a company’s total GHG emissions are indirect emissions from up and down the value chain (Scope 3).  Moreover, most Scope 3 emissions, also referred to as value chain emissions, often represent the majority of an organization’s total GHG emissions. This highlights the importance of design for sustainability as majority of emissions are effectively built in during a products development phase.

Our Appliances business unit’s engineering team is committed to creating design for sustainability transformation which include holistic material waste reduction, selection of materials with lower CO2 emission, selecting lower CO2 emission processes, tool designing for repair and disassembly, and having material traceability.  In addition, we are testing innovative new green plastics with step change to lower CO2 emissions in compliance with standards such as IEC 60335-1 to produce components and packaging.  

Additionally, our engineering team prioritizes miniaturization in our product designs to reduce material content needed for production and providing lower weight products.  Our engineering team is equipped with sophisticated simulation tools along with 3D printing capabilities to effectively model and test the performance of smaller, lighter weight product designs. We are creating an engineering culture of sustainability that focuses on customer engagement and collaboration. 

An example of our miniaturization innovation is TE’s 2.0mm Signal GRACE INERTIA connector series, which features a space-saving 2.0mm pitch design with a 40% smaller packaging volume than GRACE INERTIA 2.5mm signal connectors. This compact connector system also includes surface mount technology (SMT) headers that provide a lower mating height than conventional through hole headers. These reliable and robust connectors are suitable for some of the harshest and smallest applications in the home appliances industry. 

At TE our 8,000 engineers across approximately 140 countries are committed to creating a safer, sustainable, productive, and connected future.  

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