The Swedish multinational manufacturing company, Volvo aims to lower CO2 emissions of 2.5 million tonnes using circular business principles by the year 2025.
The company’s long-term goal to become a circular business by 2040, Volvo Cars will create closed material loops for emission-heavy materials such as steel and aluminium, as well as remanufacture, repair, reuse and refurbish parts.
The head of global sustainability at Volvo Cars, Anders Kärrberg, said:
“Volvo Cars has one of the most ambitious climate plans in the car industry, and if we are to reach our goals, we need to embrace the circular economy,”
“This requires us to rethink everything we do and how we do it. We put a strong focus on integrating sustainability into the way we think and work as a company, and we are making it as important as safety has always been to us.”
Volvo Cars already remanufactures parts such as gearboxes and engines to make better use of material and reduce emissions. In 2020, around 40,000 parts were remanufactured, saving nearly 3,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
By 2025, Volvo Cars aim to more than double its remanufacturing business. To ensure that valuable material can be kept in circulation the company recycled 95 per cent of its production waste last year.
This included 176,000 tonnes of steel, avoiding the generation of nearly 640,000 tonnes of CO2.
New business models such as giving electric vehicle batteries a second life are important from a circular business perspective.
By using batteries in energy storage applications outside of cars, new revenue streams and cost savings can be realised while also extending the batteries’ lifecycles.
Volvo Cars is investigating how batteries age when re-used in second-life applications that have significantly less aggressive cycling compared to in-car use.
They also allow the company to gain more knowledge about the commercial value of batteries after use in cars and identify potential future revenue streams.
