Volkswagen Group Environmental Conference

Frank Sprenger, Managing Director of fors, moderated the Group Environmental Conference of the Volkswagen Group on September 27-28th 2017 at Mobile Life Campus in Wolfsburg.

The meeting of the environmental experts of the Volkswagen brands had two main goals: to show the potential of the brand association and to bring the common direction of the group environmental program to a common denominator.

Speakers at the conference included Georg Kell, founding director of the UN Global Compact and spokesman for the Sustainability Advisory Board established a year ago by Volkswagen. Not only his presence showed the relevance of the topic environment. Matthias Müller, Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagen AG, and Bernd Osterloh, Chairman of the Works Council of Volkswagen AG, also emphasized in their speeches the importance of the topic for the Volkswagen Group.

A special highlight of the two-day conference was the keynote speech of Prof. Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Center. Rockström spoke to the Planetary Boundaries, a concept that shows us the ecological boundaries of our planet.

In the future, the environmental impact of the products will be considered from the delivery of the raw materials, through production and use to the recycling of the individual materials. This concept is of particular importance in terms of sustainable mobility concepts, which are increasingly geared towards the use phase.

Various initiatives of the brands, structured along the life cycle, were presented and discussed on a marketplace in the foyer. That was the basis for making better use of synergies in the Group in the future.

The direction is clear. Now it is time to go into the implementation and achieve the ambitious goals. We look forward to the role that Volkswagen will play in the transformation of the mobility industry and look forward to accompanying Volkswagen in the future as well.