It’s not only what comes out of company cars that will shape fleets’ strategies in future but what goes into them as well…
Carry that resource weight
It’s not only what comes out of company cars that will shape fleets’ strategies in future but what goes into them as well.
While carbon management is about choosing and using cars in ways that produce fewer CO2 emissions, “sustainable production and consumption” will exploit technology to lessen vehicles’ products’ “resource weight” – their lifetime load on the environment.
As an illustration of resource weight, think of five or six grams of gold – about enough make a pair of cufflinks. Producing that small amount of precious metal uses huge amounts of water and produces thousands of kilos of mining waste and carbon emissions from smelting; purifying; transporting and goldsmithing the final product.
In the end, this multiplies the total weight of the cufflinks a million times over, to six tonnes.
Vehicles are not nearly as greedy as jewellery but, even so, your average family car leaves many times its kerb weight in waste materials and energy scattered across the face of the planet before it even leaves the showroom. As global industrialisation speeds up, there is real concern that wastefulness like this will become a greater threat than atmospheric pollution.
Carmakers are already responding to the need for sustainable production; for example by using more recyclable materials and re-useable components. On the consumption side, approaches such as BMW‘s EfficientDynamics combine energy saving technologies, like auto start-stop, brake energy regeneration and intelligent alternator control, with more use of lightweight materials to reduce emissions without compromising performance.
There is every reason to believe that technological advances will enable businesses to run virtually zero-emission fleets with radically lower “resource weights” in the not too distant future. Until then, the approaching challenge for fleets will be to operate more sustainably within the constraints of today’s technologies and resources. For an interesting view of the subject, visit the fleet section of BT’s corporate sustainability web site.
CO2 emissions, it is turning out are just the beginning of the green revolution. Sustainable fleet management is going to involve knowing a lot more about the way products are made and where they go on disposal.
