Join, check in, get active: Audi is starting Environment Week for 87,000 employees
- The focus will be on the global challenges of decarbonization, resource efficiency, water use, and preservation of biodiversity
- All Audi locations are participating with actions and lectures by experts: more than 100 hours of presentations, tours, and interactive sessions
- Head of Production Peter Kössler: “Environmental education is just as important as environmental protection – only those who know the effects of their actions on the environment can act on its behalf”
Under the motto “Join us on our mission to zero,” Audi is organizing “Audi Environment Week” from July 19 to 23. With its week of action, the company is making the numerous facets of environmental protection at its own locations visible. The supporting program includes lectures, film screenings in the Audi program theater, tours in the horticultural show in Ingolstadt, hands-on actions with the Audi Environmental Foundation, and interactive sessions from the international locations. All employees are invited to participate in the program. Gastronomy services is also committed to sustainable and regional cooking for the week and, in addition to a menu they created themselves, has also prepared video tutorials for cooking those dishes at home. In all, there will be more than 100 hours of lectures, actions, and discussions from Audi’s five locations worldwide.
Audi’s Environment Week is part of the Volkswagen Group’s goTOzero weeks. The Group-wide campaign is intended to convey information about the individual brands’ environmental protection measures and objectives and to support employee networking. Individual contributions are foregrounded. Peter Kössler, Member of the Board of Management for Production and Logistics, says that “environmental education is just as important as environmental protection – only those who know the effects of their actions on the environment can act on its behalf. That’s why we want to tell people about environmental protection at Audi. As part of the Mission:Zero environmental program, we set ourselves the ambitious goal of making all our locations net CO2-neutral by 2025, cutting our water consumption in half by 2035, and implementing lighthouse projects in resource efficiency and biodiversity. To do that, we need the support of all our employees.” In online lectures, the people responsible for environmental protection in different locations will provide insights into current and upcoming environmental protection projects in the factories. Audi gastronomy services has devised a special menu for Environment Week, filmed cooking videos, and explained the climate benefits of regional dishes. The Audi program theater will show a special program of environmental films and will make the winning films of the NaturVision Filmfestival available for streaming for a week. For the past four years, the Audi Environmental Foundation has been a festival supporter and enabled it to award a prize for shorts. Audi Group Chief Environmental Officer and Audi Environmental Foundation Director Rüdiger Recknagel says that “environmental protection is teamwork. More than 100 volunteers have submitted ideas for Environment Week that they wanted to implement for their colleagues, mutually reinforcing each other in the process. Our objective is to make each person aware of the contribution she or he can make to environmental protection, both as an Audi employee and at home as a private person.”
Each Audi location is taking on designing a theme for a day
Each weekday will have a different motto and will be designed by one of the five leading Audi locations worldwide. Audi Brussels will start Environment Week on Monday (July 19) with a focus on “decarbonization.” The Belgian factory has been operation as the first net CO2-neutral* Audi factory since 2018: it uses green electricity exclusively and covers its heat requirements with biogas certificates. Emissions that remain unavoidable are offset through climate protection projects that were certified by The Gold Standard. Audi Brussels has to offset about five percent of its emissions that way. On Tuesday (July 20), the Audi location in Neckarsulm will be oriented toward a daily theme of resource efficiency. The factory has initiated numerous pilot projects with respect to handling resources economically: the Aluminum Closed Loop started there in 2017. Since then, it has been implemented at the Ingolstadt and Győr locations Since that year, the location has also tested plastic recycling in several projects. On Wednesday (July 21), Audi México will offer a look into the water cycle in San José Chiapa, which has been closed since 2019. Wastewater from production is processed through multistage water treatment so that it either can be redeployed in the factory as non-potable water or is used for irrigation. The factory can process about 1,800 cubic meters (63,566 cubic feet) of water daily that way and has already purified about 185,670 cubic meters (6,556,874 cubic feet) of water since the system came online. Moreover, employees at Audi México recently planted 1,250 trees on the factory grounds to support biodiversity preservation. Audi Hungaria will give an overview of biodiversity protection on its factory grounds on Thursday (July 22). Additionally, the Aluminum Closed Loop has started there on July 1: aluminum waste created during production will be selectively collected and brought back to the supplier, who will produce new aluminum coils from those scraps with the same quality as the originals and then bring them back to Audi. The material thereby goes into circulation. Audi’s Ingolstadt location will round out Environment Week on Friday (July 23) and propose various possibilities for how employees can become active themselves under the motto “Sustainable Responsibility.”The Audi Environmental Foundation will present its projects in lectures and tours at the horticulture show. The worldwide program will be completed with “Plogging Friday,” a trash-picking jogging circuit with the option of sharing ideas virtually as a group. Anyone who is interested can sign up by sending an email to info@audi-stiftung-fuer-umwelt.de.
* Audi understands net-zero CO2 emissions to mean a situation in which, after other possible reduction measures have been exhausted, the company offsets the carbon emitted by Audi’s products or activities and/or the carbon emissions that currently cannot be avoided in the supply chain, manufacturing, and recycling of Audi vehicles through voluntary offsetting projects carried out worldwide. In this context, carbon emissions generated during a vehicle’s utilization stage, i.e. from the time it is delivered to the customer, are not taken into account.
