Environment

It makes environmental sense to use water-saving processes and to re-use as much water as possible.

We don’t mind when it rains. In fact, at the Audi factory we welcome a good downpour because we collect rainwater in our underground cisterns – from an area of almost 450,000 square metres – to use in our car production. Since adding an additional storage facility in 2006, over 14,000 cubic metres of water can be stored in reservoirs at our Ingolstadt plant. And we’re looking to increase this figure. In 2007, this supplied nearly 240,000 cubic metres of water – that’s enough to serve the needs of a small city.

On top of these innovations, we also feed 96.3 per cent of our total water use into a closed-loop system. All this means the demand on water (and therefore the amount of wastewater used in the production of each vehicle) has been reduced from 4.9 cubic metres per car in 1988 to 1.5 cubic metres per car in 2007 – that’s a 69 per cent reduction.

We’ve already reduced our waste by a considerable amount using some innovative thinking. We all know waste significantly affects the environment, but disposing of it costs a lot of money too. And that’s not efficient.

So a thorough review of our practices on the production line led to an extensive recycling scheme and a complete rethink about the logistics of waste management. Now most of the waste produced on the assembly line is separated and sorted on-site, reducing the need to transport elsewhere for processing.

(We’ve also reduced our transport needs by using a software system which calculates every last square centimetre of loading space in our lorries, maximising the available space. Packaging is already optimised in the planning stages; our packing team and their computer find the most efficient way of loading, further reducing the number of lorry journeys.)

Like any organisation, we want to reduce the amount of energy we consume and CO2 we emit. And we’re continually doing so with an entire package of targeted projects and innovative ideas that are helping to reduce our carbon footprint. In fact, despite our car production increasing, our overall energy use has remained virtually the same.

One of the ways we’ve been able to do this is by using different sources of energy. One of these sources comes from the local municipal waste processing plant here in Ingolstadt, which supplies us with 76,000 megawatt hours of heating. This saves 19,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Another source of energy comes from within the factory, from our state-of-the-art Combined Heat, Cooling and Power production facility (CHCP). Audi invested 8 million euro in this technology, which produces electricity from natural gas, cutting 17,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

We also have a heat recovery system that saves around 60 per cent of the thermal energy produced within the plant. The heat saved annually is the same amount it would take to heat 915 family homes.

In the car body paint shop in Ingolstadt, we saw a decrease in emissions of 84.5 per cent between 1991 and 2007.

We took the decision not to use materials containing CFCs or adhesives containing solvents back in 1990, for the entire factory. This has also helped to reduce our overall solvent emissions, and thanks to water-based paint technology, the paints we use contain very little organic solvents (which are found in conventional paints). What’s more, technologies such as electro-magnetic paint application have allowed us to reduce volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions as well.

At Audi, our strategy for reducing our carbon footprint hasn’t really changed. Historically, we’ve led the way in low-consumption technologies and contributed major advances in protecting the environment.

Over the years we’ve become synonymous with advanced diesel power, ever since our first efficient TDI engine was launched 20 years ago. It was a milestone for us; it reduced our environmental impact and of course it rewarded the astute driver.

That pioneering technology put us ahead of the game, and now our next generation TDI engines are so advanced they already meet future EU5 European emission limits.

Find out more about our TDI and other efficiency technologies