Car industry getting cleaner

By Ben Pulman

Motor Industry

09 October 2007 10:11

Today the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has released its annual Sustainability report. Its eighth report reveals how green and clean the UK industry is becoming - slowly.

The headline figures will grab your attention: a cut in total annual CO2 emissions by 36.5 percent over the past four years. However, that’s not from the vehicles themselves, but from cleaner manufacturing processes at the factories building cars and vans in Britain. The actual CO2 reduction from new cars is a somewhat smaller, at 12 percent over the past decade. That’s a drop from an average of 189.9g/km to 167.2g/km, roughly equivalent of switching from a 2.0-litre Mondeo to a 2.0-litre Focus. Good, but not great when you consider Brussels is preparing plans to mandate a 130g/km average. The SMMT reckons 85 percent of a car’s CO2 emissions are produced during its usage on the road. So the manufacturers have a lot of work to do on the cars themselves to meet the 2012 proposed limits.

The other 15 percent of emissions come from the manufacturing (10 percent) and recycling of the vehicles (5 percent). Here the figures are better: as well as the aforementioned 37 percent drop in CO2, the energy used to make each vehicle has fallen by over 41 percent between 2001 and 2006. The water used per vehicle is down 43 percent in the same period, and the energy used per vehicle produced is 41 percent less. The amount of waste sent to landfill has also dropped from 80,399 tonnes in 2000 to 39,862 tonnes last year. SMMT president Graham Smith said: 'We are proud of how far we have come on sustainability measures and remain committed to further investment for the future'.

But we must take all these figures with a pinch of salt. Since 2000 Ford, Peugeot and MG Rover have axed car production in the UK. The SMMT’s figures reflect this, as since the first report in 1999 the number of people employed directly in automotive manufacturing has fallen nearly 27 percent from 260,000 to 190,800 last year. It’s also fair to say that only recently has the focus on emissions moved to encompass the factories themselves, and the first gains are always the easiest.

By Ben Pulman