For Kia, being green means more than just being a manufacturer of eco-friendly vehicles. As a company that is committed to helping the world realize its fullest potential, Kia Motors has been dedicated to the conservation of the environment and our surroundings.
The recent announcement of our ambitious Eco Roadmap for 2020 outlined Kia’s plans for lowering the harmful emissions from our vehicle line-up, which includes the expansion of our eco-friendly vehicle range from four to eleven cars by 2020. Today, we’d like to introduce some of the developments taking place at our facilities around the world in terms of optimizing research, development and production processes. Coupled with our burgeoning eco-friendly vehicle offerings, our goal is to achieve substantial growth that is not offset by negative environmental consequences.
Greener Production Flow
In 2014, Kia Motors set up the Safety & Environmental Planning group, a task force dedicated to managing the safety and sustainability of corporate systems. By applying environmental management practices to business operations, Kia is able to reduce unnecessary energy consumption and minimize pollutants for greener production.
Recycling and Eco-Efficiency
Kia strives to reduce both the amount of input materials (including energy) and output of waste and harmful emissions. Adhering to rigid green production standards and guidelines, Kia selects raw materials that will be easily dismantled, recycled, and reused in the future. This process is known as eco-efficiency, and Kia effectively recycles manufactured parts and waste output to decrease input costs and environmental pollutants. Kia’s eco-efficiency figure has improved 55.4 percent since 2004, and as a result, we were able to achieve a 9.1 percent decrease in CO2 emissions per vehicle last year.
Hazardous Chemicals
Since 2012, Kia has completely eliminated the use of the four key heavy metals: lead, mercury, cadmium and hexavalent chrome. Global restrictions have been placed on these chemicals because of their hazardous effect on our ozone. We have since replaced them at our worksites with alternative materials. With stricter management, monitoring, and inspection, we are also working to reduce other hazardous controlled chemicals during production. Since 2013, we have achieved a 12 percent decrease in year-on-year decrease in per-unit use of hazardous chemical.
Promise for the Future
With 31.6 trillion Korean won earmarked for future environmental-related R&D activities, Kia is relentlessly pursuing actions to minimize our carbon footprint and negative impact on the environment. Through safe and streamlined green management practices, Kia hopes to not only realize environmentally conscious automobile designs but also make cutting-edge improvements along the production line.
Committed to both people and nature, Kia is hopeful that our environmental and sustainability innovations will be integral in the future of automobile production. Adhering to core values of conservation, efficiency and ethical business practices, we will continue to redouble our efforts to become environmentally conscious leaders in eco-friendly production and green mobility manufacturing.
▶ Read the 2015 edition of ‘MOVE’, Kia’s annual report on sustainability and environmental conservation!
We have always made great efforts to communicate the ways in which our brand continues to head towards a sustainable future. Find out more about how Kia increases builds innovative solutions to address global environmental issues and stay tuned for the road ahead!
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