Mercedes 2010 Annual Report Download - page 89

Management Report | Profitability | 85
€2.3 billion for environmental protection. Once again in
the year 2010, we pursued the goal of preserving resources and
reducing all relevant emissions. We consider the effects of all
our processes – from vehicle development to production and to
recycling and environmentally friendly disposal. Last year, we
increased our spending on environmental protection by 8% to
€2.3 billion.
Extensive activities for environmental protection in
production. With the help of environmentally friendly production
methods, we have succeeded in recent years – with comparable
production volumes – in continually reducing our plants’ energy
consumption, CO2 emissions, production-related solvent
emissions and noise pollution. As a result, energy consumption
fell between 2005 and 2010 by 5.7% to 10.3 million megawatt
hours. During the same period, CO2 emissions decreased by 3.0%
to 3.7 million tons. Compared with the year 2009, both energy
consumption and CO2 emissions increased last year: by 16% and
18% respectively. However, this is solely a reflection of the
unusually low production volumes in the prior year caused by
the worldwide sales crisis. A more relevant comparison is with
the year 2008, which shows reductions in energy consumption
of 5.9% and in CO2 emissions of 4.6%, despite the new inclusion
of production-related fuel consumption. Without this change, the
reductions would have been 6.6% for energy consumption and
4.7% for CO2 emissions. Utilization of techniques that preserve
resources such as closed-cycle systems enabled us to reduce
water consumption by 10.5% between 2005 and 2010. Water con-
sumption was 18% higher in 2010 than in 2009, but was 10.1%
lower than in 2008.
In the area of waste management, our guiding principle is that
avoidance and recycling are better than disposal. Innovative
techniques and environmentally compatible production allow us
to steadily reduce our volumes of waste materials. Between
2005 and 2010, the total of production-related waste material
fell by 13% to 1.0 million tons. Also in this area, we recorded
an increase over the prior year – along with the substantial growth
in production volumes – of 27%. But in the more relevant com-
parison with 2008, there was a reduction of 10%. The figures stated
for the year 2010 are based on an extrapolation of the environ-
mental data currently available for 2010. The exact figures will be
released with the publication of the new Sustainability Report
in April 2011.
We make use of comprehensive environmental management
systems in our efforts to make further progress in the field
of environmental protection. More than 98% of our employees
worldwide work in plants whose environmental management
systems have been certified according to ISO 14001 or EMAS
environmental standards.