Volvo Cars is the top vehicle brand in Sustainable Brands survey
Volvo Cars has been named the best car make in Sustainable Brands, Sweden’s biggest sustainability survey across a broad range of brands.
“Volvo Cars has a broad-based approach to sustainability, which contributes to the company’s profitability. Our focus on green cars is the core of our work in this field and we have almost 100,000 green cars on Swedish roads alone, more than any other maker,” says Linn Fortgens, director of sustainability issues at Volvo Car Corporation.
Sustainable Brands 2011 is a survey of 151 companies based on a consumer perspective. The survey follows the UN’s Global Compact, which in turn is founded on ten principles that relate to corporate responsibility. These principles take into account human rights, good working conditions and action against corruption, as well as environmental responsibility.
The purpose of Sustainable Brands is to create an independent and annually recurring survey of the various companies’ sustainability communication. In 2011, Volvo Cars made it to the very top among the 18 car brands included in the survey. All told, the company took third place among the 151 brands studied.
“It’s great that Volvo is perceived as one of Sweden’s most sustainable brands. We’ve worked systematically on our social and environmental responsibility, and it’s clear that our hard work has given results,” says Linn Fortgens.
Volvo Cars tackles its sustainability responsibilities on a broad front and the core of the company’s approach is its range of green cars. The popular DRIVe series, launched in 2008, encompasses seven models all classed as green cars. Volvo Personbilar Sverige reports that it has now sold almost 100,000 such cars on the Swedish market.
In South Africa, the DRIVe range was first introduced in the Volvo S40 1.6D DRIVe in 2009. From mid-2011 the all-new S60 and V60 will also be locally available in DRIVe guise and the S40 DRIVe will receive an update.
“The Volvo V50 DRIVe is the best-selling green car in Sweden. All told, we account for 21 percent of green cars sold in Sweden,” relates Linn Fortgens.
The company’s sustainability work covers much more than just its range of green cars.
“We also work on these issues internally, for instance by improving the efficiency of our energy usage and refuse handling. We launched a new environmental strategy last year that includes a zero vision for environmental accidents, climate-smart logistics solutions and focus on the company’s water usage,” says Linn Fortgens,
According to Linn, “Diversity is another important prerequisite for profitable sustainability work. Our goal is to create and develop entirely new solutions, so we are very dependent on having a creative working environment. We quite simply take better decisions in a heterogeneous group from the viewpoints of gender, age, ethnicity and other parameters.”
When it comes to social responsibility, traffic safety continues to remain an important consideration for Volvo Cars. The company has a concrete goal: that nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car by the year 2020.
The Sustainable Brands survey is undertaken by IDG Research, Relation Capital Partners AB and Novus Group International.
Read more about Sustainable Brands (Swedish) at
https://sustainablebrands.idg.se/
and about UN’s Global Compact
www.unglobalcompact.org/AboutTheGC/TheTenPrinciples/index.html
