Guest author / reply: Anders Thomsen, Head of Public Relations, TDC
(The text below is an email sent to MachineCulture in response to the blog entry on TDC's commercial)

"For the sake of good order, I would like to stress that TDC is also a responsible company when it comes to waste disposal – and also in the communication department we have given the commercial a lot of thought.

For that reason, the actor does not throw the modem in a container for household waste, but in a special container for electronic waste. A container that is full of modems. It may have been difficult to spot. To make it easier we have now changed the commercial, so that you can clearly see that it says electronic waste on the container.

We did do quite a lot of research in connection with the commercial. There are special rules stipulating that electronic waste must be collected, but not how it should be collected, so we contacted a number of companies and authorities that are responsible for collecting electronic waste. Among others, we spoke to a number of municipalities (including the Municipality of Copenhagen and the Municipality of Frederiksberg), Waste Centre Denmark (Videnscenter for Affald) as well as to ElRetur, a private undertaking that collects electronic waste for companies.

Electronic waste is collected in many different ways. The municipalities collected waste in one way, ElRetur collects waste in metal lattice boxes/buckets.

The essence of our research was, however, that electronic waste must not be thrown into the grinder of an ordinary garbage truck as the waste must be taken to a recycling station for sorting. In the film, we have deliberately refrained from using an ordinary garbage truck from the waste disposal company R98. We have set up two containers into which we zoom down, so that you can clearly see that they only contain electronic waste.

Besides, TDC was given the green light for the film by DRRB (the Danish association for commercials and relations) and TV2, respectively, with no comments.

For more information:
TDC and waste management:
http://tdc.com/publish.php?dogtag=tdccom_csr_csr_en_dis

Moreover, you can hand in your used telephone and broadband equipment at all TDC shops (there are special boxes for this very purpose). Last year, TDC ran a campaign to make our customers aware of this in connection with the collection of used cell phones."

Kind regards,
Anders Thomsen
Head of Public Affairs, TDC