Bentley gets to work on sustainability projects

Bentley has spent the last week focused on sustainability initiatives as part of the Volkswagen Group's #GoToZero projects and Bentley's own Beyond100 goal.

The week-long programme of knowledge-sharing and best practice was designed to drive long-term change by helping colleagues to better understand their own carbon footprint and identify actions they can adopt on a personal and professional level.

Activities included a knowledge sharing 'Extraordinary Talk' from the decarbonisation team and interviews with key sustainability leaders within the business setting out key aspects of the Beyond100 strategy, including how Bentley's site in Crewe became the first carbon neutral luxury automotive factory in the U.K., being certified to PAS 2060 standards by the Carbon Trust.

Practical activities have seen the kick off of a plastics audit and a review of the progress made from the Go Paperless and Power Down initiatives launched in April.

A lean manufacturing walk through the logistics area highlighted the potential to significantly reduce plastic packaging on fuel and brake line parts. In a similar exercise earlier this year, the team also identified opportunities to eliminate over 1,000m of shrink wrapping per day and reduce outbound seat protection packaging from 13 items to six.

Colleague travel has also been a key focus point, with the upcoming launch of new facilities including a bike repair station to encourage more colleagues to cycle to work, alongside 30 new free to use colleague charging points under Bentley's 7.7MW solar array which partly covers the colleague car park. With colleagues now collecting Audi e-trons and Volkswagen ID.3s through the company car scheme, these are now in high demand.