The Green Issue Portal supports the CLN Environmental Policy by providing a space where CLN employees can suggest ideas to make significant improvements in the environmental impact of our operations.
The Portal is designed also to promote environmental actions that help CLN Group reduce its environmental impact in accordance with the United Nations Global Compact and its principles - which require companies to support a preventive approach to environmental challenges; to undertake initiatives that promote greater environmental responsibility; and to encourage the development and dissemination of technologies that respect the environment.
The initial objective of the Portal is to encourage ideas to reduce Greenhouse Gases. The issue of Greenhouse Gases has been chosen as the first topic for the Portal as CLN Group is committed to supporting the achievement of the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change – and the challenge is huge. Our customers are also setting challenging targets to reduce Greenhouse Gases, and it is important that we support them. It has effectively become the main challenge for the automotive industry going forward.
To encourage the sharing of ideas on the Portal, the person in each region submitting the best idea each year, during the period from 1 July to 30 June, will receive a prize from the Regional Leader. A Committee in the head office will judge the ideas and select the best one for each region for this prize.
The ideas that can be submitted through the Portal for assessment by the Committee during 2023 are new ideas that offer an opportunity to better tackle our objectives to reduce Greenhouse Gases, as follows:
- Reduction in the use of electrical energy
- Reduction in the use of gas
- Reduction in the use of petrol or diesel for transport
- Conversion of processes from those using gas to those using electricity
- Other idea to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as CO2
The Committee will select the best idea based on:
- Alignment with the type of opportunity set out above
- Overall impact – for example based on an estimate by the plant of the amount of GHG saved by the idea
- Applicability of the idea (cost, technology, investments required etc)
A local EHS officer will be appointed to assist with the validation.
There are two ways to submit ideas on the Portal:
- An employee of CLN Group can submit an idea directly on this Portal if the plant in which they work does not have its own system in place for collecting ideas. This is applicable in the regions of Brasil, South Africa, Turkey and Romania.
- For those plants which already have an ideas system to gather improvements from their employees, the EHS officer of the plant will submit an idea for consideration by the Committee when a local idea submission meets the criteria of a valid idea for the Portal. This means the idea should be submitted to the plant improvement ideas system already in place locally and it will be transmitted to the Committee by the EHS Officer through the Portal. This is applicable in the regions of Russia, Portugal, France, Poland, and Slovakia.
About Greenhouse Gases
A greenhouse gas is any gas that has the property of absorbing infrared radiation (net heat energy) emitted from Earth’s surface and reradiating it back to Earth’s surface, thus contributing to the greenhouse effect, which causes the Earth’s temperature to rise – this is called global warming. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most significant greenhouse gas, although other gases like methane also contribute to global warming.
Human activities - especially fossil-fuel combustion of coal, gas, oil - are responsible for a steady increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Examples in the case of CLN Group are:
- A lot of the electricity we use is generated by burning fossil fuels in all the regions in which CLN Group has operations. CLN uses a lot of electricity, for example to power equipment and to provide lighting in the buildings. The less electricity CLN uses, the less carbon dioxide is emitted to the atmosphere.
- CLN Group operations burn gas to provide heating for buildings such as offices and factories. Furthermore, many operations in CLN Group companies burn gas – for example in paint lines and for ovens.
CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere due to human activity – and this accumulation is continuing at an alarming rate. This may lead to a situation in which the concentration of atmospheric CO2 reaches a level that threatens the very existence of humanity.
To avoid this scenario, at the United Nations sponsored COP21, held in Paris, France, in 2015, many nations signed a global agreement to limit the increase of the world’s average temperature to no more than 2 °C above pre-industrial levels while at the same time striving to keep this increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. This is commonly known as the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
The only way to do this is by reducing the emissions of Greenhouse Gases.