Nissan’s carbon emmissions substantially down
Nissan Motor Co, Ltd has published its annual Sustainability Report showing that the global automaker’s carbon dioxide (CO ) emissions have fallen by 22.4 percent over the past decade.
Nissan’s success in reducing emissions, promoting zeroemission vehicles and saving energy at its facilities has made it the highest-performing automotive company tracked by the Carbon Disclosure Project, which works with thousands of companies to tackle climate change.
Hitoshi Kawaguchi, Nissan Chief Sustainability Officer, said: “We aim to deliver further environmental progress in addition to promoting all electric vehicles and pursuing efficiency in energy and resource diversity, efficiency and recycling in the current year, as part of the Nissan Green Programme. This reflects the continued efforts of all Nissan employees and partners, in line with our mid-term corporate objectives.”
Improvements in sustainability reflect initiatives such as the Nissan Energy Saving Collaboration (Nesco), which measures energy loss at Nissan plants. Last year, the company also formed a new team – Resource Nesco – with a mandate to improve water usage and increase the use of recycled materials by 25 percent for newly-launched models in 2016.
Progress on sustainability at Nissan has accelerated thanks to the success of the Nissan Green Programme, introduced in 2002. The most recent version, NGP2016, set ambitious targets to cut Nissan’s environmental impact by this year
Nissan’s measures to reduce emissions include the following:
Nissan UK has installed 19 000 solar panels to join 10 wind turbines at its Sunder- land plant, generating enough power to build more than 31 000 cars every year. The power derived from the solar panels and wind turbines accounts for 7 percent of the plant’s total usage.
Nissan Mexico’s use of renewable energy sources, including wind power energy and biomass, accounts for 50 percent of the energy used at the Aguascalientes plant since 2013.
Among methods to increase clean energy use in Japan by 8 percent to 16 percent, Nissan improved energy procurement at manufacturing plants that require a large volume of electricity, including the technical centre, Tochigi Plant, Oppama Plant, Yokohama Plant and Zama Operation Centre.
Efforts to reduce energy consumption and emissions at facilities coincided with continued innovation in the development of zero-emission vehicles.