Sustainability at Continental
By Prashanth Doreswamy, Country Head — Continental India & Managing Director, Continental Automotive Components India
Last February, before we all got locked indoors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I realized it was unusually hot. My city, which is typically praised for its pleasant weather, recorded the highest temperature in 150 years — at 33.4-degree Celsius. For the knowledge, the average temperature in Bengaluru ranges from 22–26 degrees Celsius in this period.
The temperature was not particularly the first record we broke in recent years. Nor was it the last. Unseasonal rains, sweltering weather, strange windstorms have become a part of the living. Without any guess, it is the doing of climate change.
Terms like global warming, climate change, carbon emissions are becoming part of our conversation starters.
We read about drastic weather changes, rising sea levels, and islands that could disappear entirely over the next few years, gifting the world its first climate refugees.
It is time for us to heed the warning signs and take appropriate action. Being eco-conscious and implementing sustainable practices is not a matter of choice any longer. On the contrary, it is an imperative requirement. But sustainability is not genuinely achievable by working in silos. It requires unconditional support and cooperation from all parties.
At an organization level — which I am elaborating on in this article — sustainability can be achieved when it includes its system, processes, people, and stakeholders.
Continental is Moving Towards a Sustainable Future, Globally
At Continental, we have been implementing several sustainability initiatives over the past years. However, in 2020, we codified it and adopted a comprehensive sustainability framework. This code applies to all entities of the Continental group across the world.
The new sustainability framework has four sustainability areas, which we aim to achieve by 2050.
I believe a comprehensive, collaborative approach is required to truly achieve sustainability. The manufacturing industry is infamous for consuming resources and polluting. To put this in perspective, as per a study that analyzes resource consumption by numerable companies, the average direct water use is 5.20 m3/vehicle for manufacturing processes. But we wish to be a green company. We want our manufacturing processes to be greener.
Going Green
As of fiscal 2020, Continental procures all electricity for its production sites from renewable energy sources. This is not a claim made solely by Continental; the data is the clear conclusion reached in a reasonable assurance report by auditor KPMG. As a result of Continental’s initiatives to procure green energy, we reduce our direct and indirect global CO2 emissions by 70 percent — from around 3.2 million metric tons in 2019 to 0.99 million metric tons in 2020.
Further, we rely on self-generated energy, specially designed green power purchase agreements, and energy attribute certificates (EACs). These certify from which sources and from which locations the green electricity originates. Coming closer to home — In India, we have adopted various measures to take us closer to our goals. For example, if I talk about our Manesar plant, 100 percent of the energy used in 2020 at that plant was from renewable sources. We are targeting to reach 100 percent renewable energy by the end of 2021 at our Bengaluru plant.
The green electricity initiatives also align with Continental’s global targets. By 2040, we aim to make the processes at all of our locations, numbering more than 500, carbon-neutral through massive investments in energy efficiency, zero-carbon technology, and the use of green electricity. The entire value chain will also be carbon-neutral by 2050.
Going green is more than just switching over to renewable energy.
It also refers to conserving resources and minimizing waste. For example, we could recycle 100 percent of the water used at our Bengaluru plant in 2020. Further, we also aim to save water used by our products by 2 percent. Apart from this, we have prevented significant waste generation from single-use packaging material by opting for durable packaging instead of expandable packaging.
Usually, a lot of people think being a sustainable company means an ‘environmentally friendly’ organization. But in reality, sustainability expands way beyond that, and workplace safety is an essential aspect of it.
Workplace and Employee Safety
In reaching its workplace safety objectives, Continental regularly and systematically analyzes global and internal health and safety risks to develop sustainable programs for industrial safety, health management, ergonomics, hazardous substances management, and general safety.
Ensuring representation of all categories of employees within the various safety committees and ERT, several initiatives exist to encourage active employee participation in enabling a safe work culture.
Moreover, our Industry 4.0 practices like usage Cobots and AGVs also make the manufacturing plants safer. This is because they take care of repetitive and heavy tasks and can be implemented in situations that can be hazardous for workers.
Technologies like AI/ML can also contribute to developing a safer environment for the employees.
For instance, in the Bengaluru plant, we have deployed artificial intelligence towards the digitalization of medical room data and developing a real-time incident reporting (RTIR) system.
Recognizing our efforts in this domain, Golden Peacock awarded us the ‘Occupational Health & Safety Award’ for 2020. An even greater proof of the success of our initiatives would be that we had almost zero (1 incident ) in the last quarter at our Bengaluru and Manesar plants.
Workforce Diversity for Sustainable Development
Apart from ensuring the safety of our employees, Continental is also taking decisive steps to increase workforce diversity. After all, a sustainable society has equal representation from all ethnicities, gender, and demographics.
For many sectors, workforce diversity might not seem like a challenging goal. But manufacturing in India has typically had fewer women.
This is one of our core commitments, and we have achieved this over the last few years in some parts. We also strive to hire all our workers, especially on the shop floor, from local communities. While we provide them with standard facilities like canteen, recreation, transport, there are also skill development programs that enable them to upskill and look at better opportunities.
The below video is an inspiring one for us and helps us stay on the path:
Not just shopfloors, we are ensuring more women representation at all levels of hierarchy. For instance, if we look at the Graduate Engineering Trainee (GET) program of TCI, we hire 60 percent females and 40 percent males. But the question is, of the 60 percent, how many stay and continue for the long haul and graduate to become managers.
In India, many women drop out or take a career break after 5–7 years to take care of their families.
To address this and reach our target of reaching 25 percent women leaders at Continental by 2025 both globally and in India, we have launched various initiatives. For instance, harassment redressal, flexibility-work from home, flexibility to take part times, and sabbatical option. Continental’s WeLead program helps women develop the essential skill sets required for leadership roles. Continental ensures the comprehensive development of India Women Talent with a long-term perspective.
Extending our social responsibility to the larger society to encourage women to take up manufacturing roles as career options through various skill development course work, we launched our CSR program called Women For Manufacturing. The multi-year skilling program will help build a sustainable model of skill development, empowerment, guidance, and placement support that would help more women find a place in manufacturing, eventually benefitting the sector.
This brings us to another important aspect of sustainability — CSR.
Giving Back to the Community
Community is important for us at Continental. Continental embraces its responsibility towards the society it operates in.
Continental last year began working with several gram panchayats in the Anekal Taluk, Bengaluru Urban District, to implement sustainability initiatives in villages. We aimed to build community resilience in the project area through water conservation, community mobilization, promotion of livelihood creation, and organic farming methods.
Not just our employees, we also took various steps to help the community during the pandemic outbreak. Our team, across all parts of Continental, came together beautifully to fight the pandemic. As a company, we donated ration kits to the local police station in Bommasandra, Karnataka, face shields to health care workers. In Manesar, the company donated an RT–PCR machine considered the gold standard for COVID-19 testing, to Gurugram DC, along with 300 PPE kits. Continental undertook other initiatives to help the community, including the civil up-gradation of Community Health Centres (CHCs) in Ujina Village, Mewat-Nuh, Haryana.
We are engineers — repurposing our skills to be helpful to society is the mark of a true engineer, an innovator. One of our employees, Manu Krishnan an engineer, was at home in Kerala, during the lockdown when he heard of a requirement at a local hospital for face shields. He began manufacturing face shields using a 3D Printer.
Sustainable Ecosystem
Continental looks at sustainability from an all-encompassing view. From utilizing green energy to ensuring workforce diversity, Continental has taken decisive steps to ensure a sustainable ecosystem.
Also, initiatives like transformation to Industry 4.0 are indirectly contributing to the cause. Apart from safety (as discussed earlier), Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) has presented new opportunities to unlock process innovations to develop sustainable, environmentally-friendly materials, decarbonize energy, tap digital innovation, and extend the cycle of goods within a “zero waste to landfill” framework. These initiatives also contribute to Continental’s global roadmap to become carbon-neutral.
Further, Continental is also moving its product portfolio towards technologies that contribute to a sustainable ecosystem. For instance, Part of the carbon-neutral roadmap relates to emission-free vehicles: from 2022, Continental will make its global business for emission-free cars, buses, trains, and other vehicles carbon-neutral.
We reduced our CO2 emissions at our manufacturing plants by 25 percent in 2020 (compared to 2019). We are consciously optimizing transport routes to reduce the number of vehicles plying. Numerous focused projects are rolled out concerning energy efficiency and water conservation.
Responsible value chain
Responsibility for human rights in the supply chain is an integral part of our sustainability charter, and Continental has always followed fair employment practices across all of our locations.
As a 150-year company, we believe it is vital to have these ethical practices in place, and we are in full support of laws related to it. Big companies act in a global network that impacts a variety of people and regions.
It creates income, welfare, and jobs. But today global value chains also create an enormous amount of environmental and social burdens. Therefore, safeguarding responsible business practices is the essence of a responsible value chain. We want to take on this responsibility — not just within our locations but across our entire value chain. Respecting social and environmental standards worldwide is an essential foundation of a successful business.
By 2050, the Continental value chain is to be designed based on responsible sourcing and business partnerships.
For Continental, responsibility along the value chain means that each partner creates ecological, economic, and social value for society. The main objective is to protect human rights and the environment at every link in the chain: from raw materials to production, to the customers, and to creating added value for society.
This requires compliance with due diligence obligations. The next step will include the conclusion of new partnerships to avert negative social or environmental impacts before they arise. This change cannot happen overnight, but rather will be implemented gradually. It is essential for our future viability in the coming decades. For this reason, Continental, together with our business partners, is aiming for a 100 percent responsible value chain by 2050 at the latest.
About the author
Prashanth Doreswamy is Country Head of the Continental Group in India and Managing Director of Continental Automotive Components (India) Private Ltd.
Prashanth, joined Continental in 2017, brings with him about 28 years of automotive and manufacturing industry experience in wide areas of responsibilities. Traveled widely, worked across cultures in multinational matrix organizations, built organizations, customer relations, and developed high performance teams.
