Environmental protection is also a management challenge for Continental. We established the first environmental management system in our company back in 1992.
Since the start of the 1990s, environmental protection has been established in our corporate guidelines and we introduced our own management system for this purpose in 1992. By doing so, we acknowledged early on that the continuous expansion of our business activities is also having a stronger impact on the environment as a result of rising consumption of energy and natural resources and higher emissions. We systematically counteract these ecological effects of our worldwide expansion and, at the same time, improve economic and social conditions at our international locations.
Globally uniform reporting
The primary goal of our environmental management is to minimize the consumption of raw materials and the environmental impact. With a uniform and global reporting system, we ensure that our environmental goals are observed across the corporation.
Since the introduction of the ISO 14001 standard in 1996, certification at Continental has also been conducted according to this international environmental management standard. Compliance with targets is reviewed by means of regular internal and external audits conducted as part of ISO 14001. In this context, environmental indicators for specific consumption and emissions per tonne of finished product are derived. Examples include energy and water consumption, waste production, and CO2 emissions. At the end of 2018, the more than 200 major production and development locations were certified according to ISO 14001 (environmental management) and more than 90 locations were already
certified according to ISO 50001 (energy management). This corresponds
to over 80% and roughly half of the total workforce respectively. The focus of environmental management is efficiency and thus the improvement of each specific type of consumption.